482. About power, 9

(Myls)

Blume got bitter.

But she quickly recovered.

There were many things to say about what we had encountered that day. But we had yet to feel eager to discuss the matter in length.

We went across maybe the oldest ruined city on Earth.

After more than a century, in a desert, there is nothing left but eroded rubbles left on the surface.

However what was buried still can give a faint feeling that it once was a glorious and rich place.

The subway system is still there. There’s no power of course, but the tunnels and trains still look like they might be working.

Some things still work even to our surprise.

The tiles on some floors are glowing after you walk on them. It’s eerie, in a sci-fi sort of way.

Blume guided us through the tunnels, toward the one station in the middle of the city that doesn’t have an exit above.

The underground command centre we thought.

And we entered something bigger than we imagined.

The ruins of a city below the other city. The opposite side to the surface.

A deep and vast underground complex with all sorts of compounds. A real mirror city, only slightly smaller against the one on the surface.

But that dead city below is in much better state. Sheltered from the elements, it was saved from most of the damages time could bring.

It’s still speleology for us. But between our lamps and what flows around us at our approach, we get a good feeling of how advanced this city once was.

I even found a shop with clothes on mannequins as we ventured through a commercial area.

Odd clothes, shapes and colours. I only kept the huge scarves that we can carry and use for many things. Everything else was impractical.

Blume was able to read that old language around. As dead as the English Rose spoke.

And we didn’t get lost too much along our way.

Happily I found some water, and some weird food. Well, any food will become weird after decades.

Biscuits are hard, but they still do their job.

Eventually we reached the real command centre and its locked doors.

Blume went monstrous on them.

Her main body, now behind her human figure or what’s left of it, tugged itself in like a set of giant claws or crowbars. And with sheer strength, she cranked the doors open. It was as if linens were covering her but were also extensions of her body, where she could input a lot of strength. With the power of growing roots, she broke the reinforced doors open.

We went inside the Holy of the old city of Sun.

Maybe we were the first ones ever to set foot inside, since the end of that ancient war.

In the undercity, spots were clean, and some dusty, depending on the amount of damage above it.

Here, in the core of it, it’s like entering the old Egyptian empire royal tombs.

It has been preserved almost perfectly. Even the air inside had been isolated for so long.

Lights on the ceilings even switched on somehow.

I’m travelling into a distant past, though its technology is paradoxically futuristic even to me.

Blume and her demonic inhuman aspect look so out of place in these pristine corridors.

She tells me that our footsteps feed enough piezoelectricity to lit up the lights.

I follow, still ready to draw.

~

We reach the depths of the bunker, and the control rooms.

Everything still looks as if it had been abandoned orderly yesterday.

I expected to find at least some skeletons or gunshots impacts on the walls. But no.

M - How could the capital and command centre or a city-state at war traverse time in such a good state?

B - I wouldn’t know precisely. I guess it was abandoned, before or after the war.

It doesn’t tell much.

~

Blume spends the next two days trying to restart some generator to give some power to the computers we found here and there.

I dig through the storages and offices for anything else useful.

Not even a gun was left oddly. Some medical supplies were though.

I enjoy the nicest toilets in the world while we stay there though. So it’s not too bad.

Then suddenly, other lights began to lit up. Computers and other machines began running again.

Ventilations began coughing up dust in for a while, but then to evacuate it slowly.

Blume did it... The small electric dam and nuclear power plant were definitely down forever, but there was still a temperature pump support system working. She managed to revive that.

We have maybe a few hours of electricity ahead of us.

We went into what we called the big computers room. Most of the screens that had remained dark until then were now working.

Some apparatus and computer caught fire and began burning, but the ventilation was removing the fumes fast enough so we didn’t care.

A pictogram of Solaris appeared on the main screen.

A voice rose, metallic, cold.

Blume replied in that dead language.

And the computer replied.

I never met an artificial intelligence before. And now I was witnessing a chat between a biological demon and an old A.I. as if it was the most normal thing to happen in this time.

~

As they chatted, maps of the world appeared on the screens.

One thing was shown and highlighted in the pacific ocean, along the equator.

M - What’s that?

B - According to this machine and what remains out there, the last spaceport with a working vessel.

A way for something alive today on Earth to escape the planet’s gravitational pull.

The only way left on Earth to go into space...

Somewhere lost in the ocean, east of Oceania. So far...

M - What about nukes?

Blume spoke to the A.I. again. After another minute of exchange, the maps changed.

A few spots were marked, with various levels of confidence, shown as percentages.

The highest confidence level was also arguably the closest to our location on the continent.

That was lucky.

Thousands of kilometres still.

In the Himalayan mountain range, on the northern side.

Something was there, still most likely intact.

B - I guess we both were right.

M- Let’s bring a handful of nukes into the spacecraft, and blow that piece of shit away from our solar system. Or into radioactive dust. Whichever.

B - That sounds really primal... But I’m with you on this. It’s something we can do.

Something we have the power to do.

While we still had the chance, we asked a few other questions to the computer, until it eventually ran out of power.

Back to the tomb...

And for us, outside.

~