Where the Stars of the Apocalypse Shine

Himeko’s breath quickened as she felt Shusoin’s nails dig into her shoulder. Her breath tickled her ear and she shuddered, squeezing her eyes shut until she was finally let go. The screen shut down, and the emptiness that remained reflected the orange glint of Shusoin.

“I heard the illustrious Miss Zaiyabōto was in our humble Olyhymna, so I had to meet her.” Shusoin whispered, her steps muffled by the carpet floor. She smiled at Himeko in a way that almost made her want to drop her guard. “I’ve always admired your work. Will you take a walk with me?”

“I…” Himeko trailed off as Mr. Demeter clapped Shusoin’s shoulder with excitement.

“That’s a wonderful idea! You’d learn a lot from her.” He said, pushing them both out of the room and back into the corridor. Himeko tried to reach for Kōrō and cried when the door nearly crushed her hand.

Shusoin merely smiled. “Follow me, Miss Zaiyabōto.”

Though she began to walk, Himeko didn’t follow. “How do I know you won’t try to kill me?”

“Heh, that’s a good question. I have to intention to kill you myself, especially not here. Truthfully, I want someone else to do the job for me, hehe~ Does that reassure you enough for us to walk?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Oh? The ‘you’ of the past didn't have so much bite. You’ve really changed, haven't you, Miss Zaiyabōto?”

“I don't know what you mean by that. I don't know who you are.”

“Then, Miss ‘Himeko,’” whispered Shusoin. “Take a walk with me, and allow me to tell you.”

✦✦✦

The edge of Olyhymna was far less bustling than the rest of it. There were no gold accents or white pillars here, no robots clad in simple vestments to tend to every whim and want, or many people at all. Only an old, washed-out gray building stood out against the utilitarian gray. Shusoin scanned a badge dangling from her neck and they were in.

A table devoid of anything but signs of aging and an elevator made up the entirety of the building. Shusoin scanned her badge again, and the elevator rumbled and creaked open. She stepped inside.

“Where are you taking me?” Himeko demanded to know, feet planted firmly in place.

“You’ll see.” Shusoin replied, careful.

“Tell me now.”

The tall woman hummed, smiling so her sharp teeth gleamed from the overhear sun. “You’ll see. Now come, before the elevator closes.”

She motioned for Himeko to join her. Still fearful, she obliged, standing in the far corner of the cramped elevator. It shook on the way down and its lights flickered, old on top of an outdated design. Scraps of metal had been torn off, no doubt by someone desperate, and Shusoin stepped closer to her once she saw her staring, so close they were almost touching. Her body was cold, devoid of the warmth of people, even colder than Himeko’s. Yet…something about that was somewhat comforting.

Himeko didn't like that.

“Olyhymna once went through a period of unrest only a few months after its founding, during a particularly drought,” she murmured, a hologram appearing before them both on the weathered walls. The scenes were haunting, of gaunt children in rags and chemical burns, their faces yellow and blotchy from poisoning. They reminded Himeko of herself and her brother. They reminded her of the apocalypse. “It seemed hopeless. The people were starving, broken, despondent. There was no way out…until there was. Do you want to know what that was?”

“Yes.”

“It was, surprisingly, because of the Takamagahara Protocol, and yet I am still against it. Can you guess why, ‘Himeko?’”

“Because something’s wrong with you?”

Shusoin smiled thinly. “A good guess, but no. It's because when the Protocol was needed three decades years later, it failed. It did nothing. And it made everything worse.”

The elevator shuddered into a stop, its rickety gears shaking above to announce it. Himeko turned around in one swift motion. She and Shusoin stared at one another. “How, when the Protocol was the only thing that saved us from that fate?”

Shusoin stepped away as the elevator door cried open, standing halfway between being in the elevator and out of it, and motioned outside of it with a thin smile. Himeko followed her.

A row of battered masks hung on the wall next to a sealed archive door. Suits were on the opposite wall, patched together with bits of mismatched fabric sewn in. Oxygen tanks blinking red with low reserves were plugged, haphazardly, into a large tank, as if they'd been stuffed there after they were no longer needed. Shusoin looked at them with a…strangely fond look in her eyes.

“The age where these rudimentary things have to be used has long since passed…except for the masks,” she laughed to herself (though Himeko didn't get how it was funny in the slightest,) fitting a respirator mask on her sharp cheekbones. The strap thwanged! as it slapped the back of her head, but she seemed to not feel it at all. Resting her hand on another mask, she tilted her head back at Himeko. “Do you need one too, or, like the Olyhymnian automatons your body was based on, do you not need to breathe?”

Deciding not to share that she could disable the need should she chose, Himeko nodded. “I need a mask.”

“Hm. Impractical from a design perspective, to make a bot that has to breathe.”

“I’m a person,” Himeko said, the firmness of her voice hiding the way it shook and faltered in her head. If she said it enough in her mind and aloud, would she finally believe it? “This body just houses me.”

Shusoin pursued her lips, her eyes narrowing. “I’ll decide that for myself.”

Himeko snatched the mask from her and affixed it squarely over her jaw. Within the confines of the mask, her breath tickled her, and her eyes fluttered shut, lashes thick with unshed tears. Shusoin watched her, as still as a statue, before twisting the vault door open and slipping out. Himeko let her tears spill and hastily wiped them away with her cardigan’s sleeve.

A gray wasteland greeted her when she stepped out. Parts of the ground, far off on the horizon, burned with unnatural flames that might never fully die out. Craters littered the ground’s surface and some were large enough to host cities of their own. Emaciated rodents scavenged here, and Shusoin bent down to leave a pile of nutrient pellets every few paces of their walk.

“Why do you leave those behind?” asked Himeko.

“Everything deserves a second chance at life, whether its a rat, a person, or the planet,” Shusoin answered.

Stopping, Himeko reached down, stroking the frail fur of a rat as it ate. The wind picked up, soft as it carried the scents of burnt rubber and plastic with it. “When we were first starting, we tested it with rats – if a brain could be merged with technology and respond.”

“I know.”

“When it finally succeeded, the rat only lasted a few days before the cube was unresponsive, but it gave us all hope that maybe it would succeed. That maybe we weren't doomed, and that the planet wouldn't always look like this,” she motioned around herself with both arms spread wide. “That day, two Stars of the Apocalypse were detonated over the city, destroying half of New Urania. I’m grateful we survived, but it was only because of the Protocol.”

“Was it really just because of the Protocol, or the human spirit?”

“…Both, if I had to say, since all the Takamagahara Protocol is humanity put into words and instructions and the hands of a select few. Now, tell me how it failed Olyhymna back then.”

Striding forward, Shusoin began to speak. “Olyhymna wasn't originally a ‘floating city.’ In fact, this used to be Olyhymna. This land used to feed all of the remaining world, and now it's a wasteland. Like your story, the so-called ‘Stars of the Apocalypse,’ the nuclear bombs shot into space by numerous countries and dropped onto the Earth, rained down on the city. We still don't know what country they came from, or why they were released, but still the people of that age fled inside the city’s membrane, but even it wasn't strong enough to withstand more than a few weeks of nuclear erosion. Yet, its cube saw no reason to act.”

“What? That doesn’t make any sense. The HCIP was designed to act quickly and prioritize human preservation.” Himeko said.

“You can say that all you want, but it doesn’t negate the truth. It refused to act even as accelerated radiation ate away at the city’s membrane at an alarmingly fast pace. Its inhabitants began to dwindle down into only the rich, throwing the destitute out into the encroaching maw, and they huddled around the cube, pleading for it to act. It didn’t care. It didn’t have the capacity to care anymore, not after the radiation withered its human heart.”

“The cubes were designed and reinforced with materials resistant to the Stars of the Apocolypse.”

“But they were never immune, were they?” asked Shusoin, tilting her head back to hold Himeko’s gaze. She looked away as Himeko’s shoulders slumped. She had no argument. “Once a cube takes over a city’s systems, there is no way to regain complete control of those systems even by the cube’s chosen guardian - myself for Yoshita Asaumi or Eva Nahaku with your real self – unless you extract the person inside and decommission the cube. Permanently.”

“That’s impossible! There’s no way to do that!”

Shusoin stopped walking. Beneath the unyielding sun that pierced the cloud barrier, she was a roaring, unquenchable flame as she looked back at Himeko. “And yet you’re looking at her.”