[Author's Note: I'm taking a break from /r/WritingPrompts. Instead, I want to expand/combine a couple of the existing posts. This will continue from from where yesterday (Escape Mo) left off.]
"I have the information that you requested," Erics said in Mo's ear. She was crouching behind one of the large transformers, looking back towards the fence. The soldier types were looking through the fence, trying to catch a glimpse of her. One of them was on his knees with a pair of wire cutters, working his way up the chain link, making a hole for them to get through. Mo ducked back from sight and dashed to the next bank of humming blocks with giant alien ears sticking out.
"Which information is that?" Mo asked.
"You had requested the location of the surrounding security cameras and other connected surveillance devices," Erics said. "We have now assimilated enough of the new nodes that we were able to gather that information. Do you still want it?"
"Depends. Is it the cameras back at the overpass or is it something closer?" Mo sat with her back against a cooling fin attached to a large white box. She rubbed her bleeding leg.
"We have set up a list of all the cameras within a moving five hundred meter circle centered on you. Will that work?"
"Yeah. Great! Will you put them on a map and throw it up on my HUD?" A small map appeared in the lower right of her vision with small cameras dotted on it. Each camera also had a cone of red coming out its front, indicating what it could see. "Actually," she said after a moment, "Can you access any of the cameras? I'd like to be able to watch those guys chasing me."
"Please wait a moment."
Mo risked another glance back at her pursuers. They had cut a the chain link about half way up and were bending one side back. The first one was almost through to her side. "I'm not sure that I have a moment."
"Understood. We are efforting to convince the local security AI that we are to be allowed access. It is being stubborn."
Mo took a deep breath and looked around the substation. She was leaning against a large white box, maybe eight feet to a side. There were four fins sticking out of each side and two large wires connected on top, each running through a stack of disks. The paint on the side was beginning to peel and there was a touch of rust running down the sides. And her backrest box was not alone. There were rows and rows of them with a grid of wires suspended by girders connecting them all together. All of them looked old and neglected, like the one she was leaning against. Peeling. Rusting. Drooping. But still humming.
The fence surrounded the whole field of boxes and wires. There was a gate on the east side with a large factory type building on the other side. The windows were mostly broken and the rust and peeling continued. It did not look like anyone had been in there in years[1]. Most importantly, the gate was broken and Mo thought that she could get through.
Without thinking much, Mo picked up some gravel and threw it as hard as she could away from the gate. Then she sprinted (limped with aggression) towards the gate and squeezed through. As she was making her way to the building, a portion of her HUD was replaced by a camera view of her pursuers. "Thanks," she sub-voc'd to Erics between breaths.
"You are welcome," it said. "We have also upgraded the security around the local security and changed all of the usage rights. It will take a technician on site to hard reset the system to fix what we have done."
"Great, I think."
"It means that you will be able to see them but they won't be able to see you. This should last for a few days as long as you are on this AmPow[2] site."
As Mo approached the building, she saw that soldier types had not been distracted by her gravel for long. They swam through the opening in the broken gate and kept coming after her. Mo hit the wall of the building and lurched up a short flight of stairs to the door. The lock had long since been opened by someone sticking their hand through the brick sized hole in the window. She pushed through and inside.
The space she entered was enormous, the dim lighting making it look much larger on the inside[3] than she had expected. It was a confusing mess of pipes and ducts and other things that transferred materials inside of themselves. There may have even been some conduit. Embedded in the floor were large cylinders on their sides, the top third sticking up six feet above the floor. Mo dashed (fell with control) down the inside steps and ran to the left, ducking under a duct here and over a pipe there. She tried to steer herself down the length of the building, towards the wall opposite the door she had come in.
In the corner of her eye, she saw the soldiers approaching the building. One was hanging back at the broken gate, presumably to make sure that she did not double back. The other three were climbing the stairs. They did not appear to be taking precautions against her attacking them: no getting in position or keeping a low profile, they just charged. She would have been offended by their disregard for her as a threat, but she knew that they were right. Mo grabbed some broken glass from the floor, trying not to cut herself, and threw it to the opposite side of the door just as they came in.
This time, the soldier types were distracted and turned away from her as they came into the plant. Staying low, Mo slowly crept along, trying to keep her breathing slow and quiet, her movements careful and planned. If they were on the other side, then she did not want to do anything to draw their attention back. They were less careful, putting an exclamation point on their assessment of her lethality, which allowed her to track their position even through the tangled interior where the cameras had spottier coverage[4].
As they reached the far end of the building and did not find her, the soldiers spread out and started sweeping back towards the door all of them had entered. Mo, pursed her lips and looked around. There were no cabinets or closets to hide in and it would not have mattered if there were: those were the places her pursuers would look first when they encountered them. Suddenly, her HUD flashed a single word in yellow block letters right in the center of her vision: UP
Mo nodded and started working her way up the nearest pipe, stepping on valve wheels and fittings and anything else that her boots would grip. She still tried to move quietly, but up was much harder than across. She found herself panting quickly. And her wounded leg was twinging with every step up. She had hoped that the barbs had only scratched her badly, but it might be something more serious.
Fortunately, it did not take many moves for Mo to get up above the soldiers. When she was roughly fifteen feet up, she started making her way to the far end of the building again, using the metal tangle as a jungle gym. While there were many pipes and fittings and such, she quickly learned that not all of them were equally useful to her. The ducting, for instance, would hold her weight, but not without bending. She was afraid that it would send out a sheet metal peel of thunder if she put any real weight on it. The steel pipes were a more solid option and she tried to stick to those as much as possible. But even those had problems. The yellow ones were fine, but the blue ones had foam insulation wrapped around them, making them both slipperier and too wide for her to grip.
She reached the far end, and, as she had hoped, there was another door. She slid down an electrical conduit grouping right next to it, but just as she was about to step onto the floor, she heard one of the soldiers yell, "I've got blood! She's up in the pipes!" Mo looked down at her leg to see the tattered remains of her pants soaked in blood. She looked up to where she had been and saw the pipes smeared with her red blood. Again, her HUD flashed a message: DISTRACT WITH DOOR. Mo nodded.
Staying on the conduit, Mo reached out to the door handle and eased it open. Then, taking a deep breath, she pushed the door against its closing spring as hard as she could and started climbing back up. The door swung open for a moment, then started back, crashing closed. Instantly, she heard the soldiers start running towards her end of the building. Mo climbed up above the door and lay down on top of some ducting, hoping that the noise she made was covered by the sound of the soldiers running. All three of them charged out the door, letting it slam closed behind them.
Mo was able to watch what happened next on the camera view in her HUD. As the three soldiers emerged, she saw utility truck start up and drive towards the main gate. Two of the soldiers gave chase while the third dropped to one knee and started shooting. One of the truck tires blew out, but the truck did not stop, crashing through the gate and on to the road, nearly tipping as it turned right and kept going.
The three soldiers regrouped in front of the gates. A minute later, the fourth came into view and they all talked for a second. Then an auto-car showed up and all of them piled in and headed after the truck.
"Thanks," Mo said to Erics.
"You are welcome," it replied. "You have greatly expanded our processing and nodes. Our partnership with you has been beneficial. The Whole considers you an asset that must be maintained. With that in mind, we suggest that you rest here for a while. We will use the remaining utility fleet stored here to keep our pursuers busy."
"Yeah. That sounds like a great idea. I don't suppose that you can get a pizza brought in, can you?"
"Food is a priority after rest, but that course of action is deemed too risky at this moment."
"I know, it was just a dream." With that, Mo turned over on top of the conduit and went to sleep.
[1] Despite how much she used it, Mo had never really thought about where her electricity came from (aside from her arterial generator powering her PTN). What she was looking at was a dinosaur. A dinosaur that used to burned the remains of other dinosaurs. A gas fired generation plant. A dead gas fired generation plant. The power company of the time had shut it down due to both political and economic pressures: no one wanted the pollution and green power sources had become as cheep without the need for a supply of fuel. So they shut it down. The substation was another story. Power still needed to be distributed (and redistributed with the rise of roof-top solar and other micro power installations) and the transformers were expensive. So the field of white boxes and wires continued, but the plant next to them was now abandoned.
[2] American Power. The biggest disruption to the electrical power grid since its inception was the rise of grid-connected home generation in whatever form (solar, wind, fuel cell, smoke-detector-radiation-piles, etc.). All of the home generation took some of the strain off of the larger generators and allowed for cross-region electrical support (California powering New York for a few hours during the evening and vice-versa for the morning). However, with people buying less power from the local power company, that company started having trouble generating (heh) enough revenue to maintain the power lines. That revenue was never a line item on the bill, but was included in the price of each kilowatt-hour that a consumer purchased. Now, people were generating at home, buying less power and there-fore paying less to maintain the grid. Yet, they complained when the lines went down due to weather or age or car accidents, especially when their home generator was not able to generate power (at night for the solar crowd). This was further compounded by most of these companies having their rates regulated by officials who do not get reelected if they raise rates. The result was the mass bankruptcy of regional power companies that caused a chain reaction throughout the power industry. It became known as the Black Out Bubble, and resulted in the federalization of the US power grid. Except Texas, because Texas.
[3] Unfortunately, not a TARDIS.
[4] It has not been mentioned yet, but by this point EVERYTHING has a camera looking at it. Usually several. Lenses and CCDs were cheap, motion detection software free and even face detection became something that everyone could implement. And this did not take into account the cameras in motion like the dash cams or the pickup in Mo's PTN, right on the bridge of her nose. People assumed that they were being watched all the time. They also assumed that no one had the time to review all of the images and that unless you did something that triggered a piece of software, all of those cameras did not matter much. For the most part, they assumed correctly.
