Chapter Fifteen - The Bad Kind of Interesting

“The last game was stupid-hard, but the water level on this one? It’s just not playable. It’s streamer-hard, not casual hard.”

--Most Eldest Ring Forums, 2037

***

With the front of the Museum of Natural History being itself part of history, it wasn’t exactly hard to find a way in. Though there was a lot of glass laying around and I wasn’t sure if the building’s structural integrity had taken a hit or not.

“You know, you could have tested that on another building,” I said.

“This is the one the hive’s in,” Manic shot back.

“Yeah, but we could have snuck over to the hive. Now, unless they’re all deaf in there, they’ll see us coming.”

Manic shrugged. “So they’ll come out to where I can shoot them better. That’s not sounding like much of a problem to me.”

I resisted the urge to roll my eye. She wouldn’t be able to see it anyway. “Let’s head in. They’ll probably be on the lower floors if anything.”

My boots crunched on loose glass and I stepped over a chunk of masonry before ducking into the museum. Manic followed, her gun refolding itself into a smaller configuration. I hoped that it had multiple settings and didn’t just have a ‘blow everything up’ mode, especially if we were going to be fighting indoors.

I paused once past the threshold and craned my neck back to take in the museum’s layout. It seemed as if the main lobby area was a big open space, reaching all the way to the top of the building and with balconies that let people entering peek into the second and third floors.

A huge whale skeleton hung from the ceiling by a set of metal wires. Some of the bones had been blasted off, but it was still obvious that it was a whale. A plaque hung next to it. Martha, the Last Whale on Earth! Now on Loan from the Ocean and Seas Museum of America!

“You broke the whale skeleton,” I said to Manic as she stepped up after me while making noticeably more noise.

“Huh. Well, my bad.”

“At least you own up to your mistakes,” I said with a nod. She flashed me a glare, but I turned around and headed deeper in before she could get a word in edgewise. The second floor looked like more of a reception place than a museum, and the first floor had a playspace for kids, with tactile displays and cartoonish animals explaining things in simpler terms.

I imagined that the areas above were more adult-oriented.

A holographic sandwich board, probably battery-powered since it was one of the only things in the museum that was lit up, sat by a staircase leading up. “Fourteenth annual gathering for the benefit of the Burlington Music Society,” I read aloud. “That something you’re part of?”

She scoffed. “Please. This kind of stuck-up shit? They’re all about the old-old stuff. We’re talking fifties rock and classical bands.”

“You’re not a fan of the classics?” I asked.

“Oh, I love the real classics,” Manic said. “Pre-diaspora Justin Beiber, Imagine Dragons before they went all cyborg. The real music from back in the day, before AIs took all the soul out of it.”

“Yeah, I’m not super into music. Never really developed a taste for it. I like some songs, don’t like others. It’s all just beeps and boops, you know?” I raised my Laser Pointer to my shoulder and started to scan the area. Fortunately, there was a handy map on one wall that I scanned for a moment. The maintenance access was a little deeper in. I figured that would be the best way to go down.

“How old are you, anyway?” Manic asked.

“Eighteen-ish,” I said.

“Ish?”

“Orphaned as a kid, didn’t exactly keep good track of things,” I said. “Never really did birthdays much either.”

“Huh,” she said. “Well, I guess you still have time to acquire some taste before it’s too late.”

“Don’t need to be such a bit--” I paused, then raised my off-hand in a fist above my head. Manic went quiet too. I focused some more on my hearing. There was something scratching at something nearby. “You hear that?”

Manic shook her head. The augs over her ears peeled back, and she frowned. “No, nothing.”

I knelt down and listened more intently, letting my cybernetic ears do their thing. “Yeah, there’s something below us. It’s scratching something. Maybe digging?”

“You’ve got good ears,” she said.

I pointed to the armoured stubs above my helmet, both shaped like the cat ears they were protecting. “They’re still newish. Anyway, let’s find a way down. There’s no way the antithesis don’t know we’re coming, so we might walk into an ambush.”

“Want to go first then, since you’re all armoured up?”

I nodded, then faded into invisibility. “I’ll take care of it, no worries.”

Manic blinked at where I stood, then I started to move and she didn’t follow me with her gaze. “You can do that?” she asked.

“It’s my specialty,” I said from about two metres to the right of where she thought I was. “Myalis, want to give her AI an idea of where we are? I don’t want to get bass-cannoned.”

I continued on deeper into the museum, gun sweeping left and right as I started to look for trouble. A few of the displays looked like they’d been broken into, but I couldn’t tell if that was looters or aliens. There wasn’t any blood around, or many signs of trouble.

We crossed a section dealing with the local geography that looked entirely unbothered. It looked like most looters were more keen on throwing rocks than picking up new and interesting ones. Finally, we reached a maintenance door which was locked shut, the Employees Only sign printed on it a pretty clear indication that we weren’t supposed to be pushing through. So, of course, I shot the door’s hinges off.

“Huh, that’s a quiet-ass gun,” Manic said as I raised a hand and caught the falling door. I lowered it down until it was close to the ground, then let it fall with a whump of displaced air.

“Yeah. Not much of a point in being stealthy if you give yourself away with the first shot,” I said. “Myalis, do we have blueprints of this place?”

We do. The reason I suspected that the antithesis were around this building is because of an unusual heat build-up in the area. The interior of the museum is several degrees warmer than it should be.

“So, strange and mysterious warmth. That’s not a perfect indicator of aliens,” I said. “Maybe someone’s growing something in the basement... is weed legal here?”

Manic shrugged. “It’s easy to get, legal or not.” She shouldered her bass-cannon and looked into the maintenance area. It didn’t have the benefit of a floor-to-ceiling wall of glass to allow sunlight in, so the interior was dark except for a flickering emergency exit sign.

I stepped in, the visor on my helmet compensating for the lower light levels a bit, though I supposed that better gear existed for that same purpose.

Manic sighed. “Give me a bit, I need more light.”

“Might want to order like, a headset, or glasses that let you see in the dark. Or a helmet. You have no idea how dangerous it is to be fighting aliens without good head protection,” I said. I was quite fortunate that I was resistant to my own hypocrisy.

I waited as Manic ordered something up. It turned out to be a sort of half-helmet visor thing that covered the top half of her face and wrapped around to the back of her skull. It let her hair out free. “That’s better. I’m going to be low on points soon.”

“We’ll find something for you to murderize yourself back to a good number of points,” I said. “Or I can donate you my old stuff.”

“I’d rather not,” she said. “My gear looks good.”

“Ouch.”

The maintenance area wasn’t all that grand. We crossed a tiny breakroom with a wall-full of lockers, then a few other essentials: a couple of tiny offices, a closet with all of the breakers and servers for the museum, another closet with mops, buckets and a few shut-down cleaning mechs.

There was a small warehouse space with shelves all over, but judging by how dusty it was, it hadn’t been crossed by any aliens in a while.

Then we found a door leading to a second warehouse space. On opening the door I was blasted by a gush of warm air that I felt thanks to my suit’s haptics. More shelves, more dust, but this room was unique because the last one didn’t have a fuck-huge water-filled hole in the middle of its floor.

“Well, that’s interesting,” I said. I walked to the edge of the hole and looked down, only to find one of those monkey-like model ten staring up in our general direction atop a thick plant-like artery.

***