CHAPTER 1

Towering above the surrounding wasteland, Pittsburgh was gleaming like a jewel.

This effect, colloquially referred to as ‘ray-shine’, was the colorful result of the ozone shielding that enveloped the entire city-state to compensate for the stripped atmosphere over the former United States. During sunspots, like the one taking place right now, it could be nearly blinding for the many residents of the Pittsburgh enclave, but that was a small price to pay for not dying of skin cancer at fourteen (depending on who you asked).

Ever since the fall of the United States government, the question of how the sovereign territories within that had once been states would operate had been a difficult one to address. The thirty-seven surviving states had come up with around a hundred different answers, and there had been varying degrees of success in implementing each. At worst, some - like Idaho and California - had fractured or dissolved completely under the weight of their own autonomy. Others, like Texas, had aggressively taken the opportunity to pursue a fabricated memory of days long gone, of martial law and aggressive xenophobia put forth as 'the only way'. New republics like this were technically intact, but there weren’t many who would refer to them as civilized.

Pennsylvania, like many, had almost collapsed - but Pittsburgh had survived, even thrived.

The Steel City was looking a little more literal these days, with an enormous alloy seawall encircling the border. In combination with the ozone shield, it resembled some sort of prismatic turtle.  There was no longer room for the urban sprawl of the past, not with so little of the country inhabitable anymore and the power draw of the ozone shield. Instead, the city had sprouted straight up, retrofitted skyscrapers and entirely new towers dominating the horizon from nearly a hundred miles out.

Inside of these strictly defined borders, there was always work to be done. A city-state looking to defy gravity had to do so with persistence, lest it topple upon itself; as such, construction drones flitted all around Amelie as she emerged from her apartment. She completely ignored them. Their constant buzz was just a fact of life, just like the scaffolds that she ducked under and the ‘UNDER CONSTRUCTION’ signs that had cut off her best path to get to school on time for the last three months. It had been frustrating, especially since she struggled to get out of bed in the morning lately anyways.

Today, however, she’d had an easy time waking up, thanks to the screaming match that her parents had gotten into just after dawn. Something about the coffee machine being broken, or cold, or whatever...it didn’t matter. It wasn’t about the coffee anyways. The fights weren’t ever about what they acted like they were about.

Leaning against the safety railing that did its best to prevent a four thousand foot drop despite an increasing lack of maintenance, Amelie stared out over the city, squinting from the ray-shine. It was going to be a hot one today; the ozone shield could stop the radiation, but not the temperature. In the layered markets of the levels below, she could already see that many people had the same idea. Most were dressed in layers of thin, breathable fabric; expensive stuff, especially these days when the materials for them were more and more rare.

Tired as she was, she was afraid she’d nod off in a few minutes if she just sat here and baked. Deciding to get some coffee of her own, she pushed herself up and wandered towards the elevator that would take her down to the markets. Even at nine in the morning, there were dozens of commuters lined up to do the same, whether to grab some breakfast on the way to the railway or just to do some early shopping. Not looking forward to the wait, or sharing a cramped elevator with a load of sweaty old dudes, she opted to turn and simply leap off the railing instead.

This didn’t draw so much as a gasp; freefalling was all the rage with kids her age nowadays. The people around were more likely to judge her form than try to stop her, thanks to the sight of the bracers on her wrists. As the wind whipped through her hair and she rapidly approached the tents and pavilions of the market below, Amelie closed her eyes, calling to mind the commercial that had won her over.

Grapplers! True freedom, all in a compact package! From your friends at AdventureTech! There had been a catch jingle and everything. She remembered it because she liked irony, and what else could you call the fact that ever since they’d started selling these, break-ins at AdventureTech facilities had skyrocketed, using the very same grapplers?

Opening her eyes as her Heads-Up Display came to life, Amelie extended one arm to latch a rapidly extending cable onto an old fire escape ladder. Made from microscopically structured graphene, it had incredible flexibility and tensile strength - at an incredible cost. She’d emptied a year of allowance for the premium package, but it had been worth it.

She swung around with the gyroscopic stabilizer inside, her glove compressing and reinforcing different ligaments, compensating for the strain on her arm. She repeated the gesture on a street pole, landing in the market in a roll and winding both cables back in with a flick of her wrists.

“Watch it!” Someone chirped as the hook nearly took a chunk out of their ribcage.

“Sorry!” Amelie called back, ducking her head as she headed towards the closest cafe. Enzo’s was the most popular in the area, but she and her friends tended to prefer Coffeetopia; mostly because the owner didn’t mind keeping the televisions there on the shows their parents wouldn’t let them watch.


 Amelie glanced at her wrist, where a small implant gave her the time, weather, and e-mails. Nothing from any of her friends about plans today, but that wasn’t surprising this early in the morning. Slipping inside of Coffeetopia, she grabbed a booth and made an order on the terminal before leaning back into the comfortable leather seat. It was as good a time as any to take care of schoolwork, and it might get her mind off of her parents and their constant bickering lately.

"Hey, Teach," she joked quietly as her HUD came back up. She was greeted by the form of a tall, thin man wearing glasses in the corner of her eye. Last year, her class had an AI that was actually pretty good at answering student questions, but ever since the budget cuts, they'd been bumped right back down to the same P.I.s, a dual acronym meaning both Pseudo-Intellects and Private Instructors, that she had been using in pre-school. Enabling the lesson as the latte she’d ordered arrived, Amelie braced herself for the usual vertigo that she felt every time she entered virtual reality. These things just weren't kind to anyone with motion sickness. Maybe if she fiddled with the Field of View…

A couple of seconds later, Amelle was enjoying a bird's eye view of the continental United States, or at least what it had once been before the storms had ravaged the coastlines and the droughts had emptied the Midwest of fertile soil. She was resuming a lesson from the day before, which had all stemmed from a simple query: 'What happened to the Caribbean?'

The P.I. wasn't nearly as good at handling questions as a genuine AI, but it had just enough processing power to make the attempt. Somewhat inefficiently, it had walked her through the gradual decay of the global climate, culminating in the increasing frequency and severity of hurricanes for the last few decades. Then had come the Superstorm, dramatically and appropriately named. It had buried multiple countries and even submerged Florida - permanently.

That wasn't what she wanted to know, though. It was being evasive, and had been ever since she’d opened this line of questioning. Keying up the search engine, she tried typing, her fingers touching nothing in the real world but clattering against a projected keyboard in her augmented field of view. 'But what happened with rescue operations?' She typed out. Damn thing had awful voice recognition.

After taking a good few seconds to try and calculate an answer, the P.I. launched her into another lesson, a little closer to what she'd been looking for.

"After the Superstorm that ravaged the United States coastline and the Caribbean," it began, flying her like she was some sort of living airplane over the Gulf of Mexico, "President Khan attempted to allocate funding towards the rescue efforts of the countries and states primarily affected. However, Senate protests against foreign aid in light of the crop crisis at the time stymied her efforts, and by the time the stalemate caused by a lack of decisive majority passed, it was too late. Haiti, Cuba, and Jamaica had already began total evacuation, and the Cayman Islands had no government left to speak of in light of instituted martial law. Next--"

The instructor cut off, interrupted by flashing red warnings to not deactivate the program while it was in use. Side effects could include nausea, disorientation, vertigo --

“God damn it.” This default warning came every time she started getting too deep into this subject. Was her chip defective? She picked up her latte and drained it in a single go - she needed that - as she considered sending it in to the help center.

“I mean, there’s gotta be something wrong with it, right? They don’t just censor random history lessons. There was nothing controversial about it,” Amelie muttered to herself, taking her empty mug to the counter.

“I don’t know. I just make coffee,” a bored-looking woman replied as she picked up the mug. That was why she liked Coffeetopia. Human baristas who didn’t give a shit what you had to say, instead of robot baristas who didn’t give a shit what you had to say.

Confirming the pay deduction from her chit for the latte, Amelie started out of the cafe. Chances were she’d be back again before the end of the day, the way her mom’s yelling and her dad’s passive-aggressive sniping had reached a fever pitch. They’d probably be at it all day at this rate, and no way was she going to listen to that for the rest of the night.

Taking a deep breath, she reminded herself not to blame them too much. They were having a hard time handling the past few months; worse than she was. It’d pass...hopefully. Maybe it -would- be best to head back home, talk some sense into them. Just because Chase was gone…

Lost in her own head as she emerged from the cafe, Amelie didn't see the enormous piece of rubble coming down until it was too late. An enormous piece of concrete and rebar, like some kind of artificial boulder, was hurtling towards her, broken off from the half-finished skyscraper taking up most of the street over. It would surely have crushed her if not for what must have been a construction drone, known as a Bumblebee, that came crashing into her like a cannonball. She heard one of her ribs crack as she hit the ground, the skittering drone atop her.

"What the fuck?!" Amelie coughed out. She tasted the latte she’d just drank threatening to come right back up her throat, seasoned with bile. The Bumblebee was just doing what it was programmed to, but what had allowed this kind of accident to occur in the first place?

She wasn't going to get an answer from the drone, that was for sure. The poor thing was destroyed, half of it completely crushed by the debris, the other half splattered across the pavement from the impact of hitting the ground. People were scattering in every direction, jostling her and shoving her aside as they tried to evacuate from the markets as quickly as possible. Amelie ignored them, save for wincing from the pain as someone elbowed her far too close to where she’d just busted up her ribcage. If she could find the drive intact, she might be able to access the memory, but did she have time?

She looked straight up, trying to get a sense of what was going on with the skyscraper that was coming apart. She thought she saw it shaking, but it was hard to tell with how bad the ray-shine was today. Any attempt she took at getting a closer look just caused her eyes to water, even through the light refractors built into her HUD, so she gave up and decided to focus on escape. The last thing she needed was a second manmade meteor falling on her head while she was being curious.  Amelie backed off and fled the market as well, casting a glance back over her shoulder. She was a little embarrassed about how bad she felt for the drone; it was just acting on automated programming, after all.

Flinching from the pain in her side and breathless by the time she reached the edge of the district, Amelie instinctively leveled her grappler at the railings of the platforms she’d come down from. Another rumble from the skyscraper nearby shook the entire market, nearly knocking her off her feet and provoking a number of screams. This was bad. The elevators were going to be a panicked mess, and they’d already been crowded before. The only alternative, however, would probably only exacerbate her injury. As advanced as grapplers were, they weren’t built to be used when you were hurt. One wrong move and she’d drive that bad rib directly into an organ.

Compromising, Amelie decided to take her chances jogging beside the railing that prevented anyone from going over the edge of the markets. Layered as it was, Pittsburgh saved space by using dozens of cables and rigging to suspend enormous metallic platforms between the towering skyscrapers that were constantly being built upon further. Though liable to sway a bit on a particularly windy day, these pseudo-districts were often considered plenty safe; but one major vulnerability was that if the buildings they were attached to started coming down, well, they were going to go with it. That was the concern of Amelie, and many others, regarding the market they were in; and why everyone was in such a hurry to get to somewhere more stable. If OSHA was still a thing, they most definitely would not approve; but that was the price of progress.

Amelie breathed a sigh of relief as she came into sight of the second elevator at the far end of the market. She’d been banking on the possibility that everyone had rushed to the closest lift, and she’d been right. There were still a few people pouring into this one, but she was able to board within a minute. None too soon, as another piece of debris, then a third, fell like meteorites onto the bolted steel-and-plastic floor she’d just left, punching fist-sized holes into it and causing the suspension cables to strain.

“Holy shit,” someone said from behind her.

The ride up from the elevator was thankfully stable. Most of them were built from the remains of old mining cranes, ugly but immensely sturdy. Like much of Pittsburgh, especially this far up, they contributed to the slapshod aesthetic of the city that many found pride in. Amelie personally found it rather lazy and unlikeable, but right now, she was just glad to not be jostled around.

The lift took her right back to the catwalks that were attached to the residential skyscraper that her apartment was built into. Finished a couple of decades ago by the LiveWell conglomerate that handled most of the housing needs in the city, the two thousand story building had been considered the peak of luxury when it was constructed. With buildings three, even four times the size having sprouted up since then, it had settled comfortably into lower-middle class as more and more of the lower levels were converted into support infrastructure. Her parents had taken advantage of these developments driving the citizens upward and upsetting quite a few landlords through liberal use of eminent domain. They’d gotten an apartment for half the price they should have, a luxurious 800 square feet. Her and her brother, Chase, had even gotten a bedroom to share, until…

As soon as she opened the door to the apartment, her father enveloped her in a hug. "Amelie! I saw you on TV. I'm so glad you're alright." An enormous man, Josue Desmarets had a grip like a bear, affectionate and strong. Amelie gasped out as he wrapped her up in his great hairy arms. “Dad! Careful. I think I broke a rib.”

Releasing her immediately, Josue patted her cheeks with both hands, each of which could easily clasp her entire head in a palm. “Sorry. I saw you on the news and your mother and I have been worried sick. Why did you not answer your calls?”

"...What?" She replied. “I didn’t get any…” She lifted her wrist, tapping the hardlight display that projected. Her communicator was offline, likely jostled by the impact from the drone that had tackled her. A reboot would fix it, but she was already chastising herself for not thinking to do that, knowing how much her parents would worry. “Sorry, Dad. I was just in a rush to get out of there. Wait - it’s on the news? Is that skyscraper really coming down or something?” Seeing the confusion playing across her face, her father sat down on the couch, gesturing for her to join him. She did so, marveling at the resolution of the projected light that made up the screen. This was new. “...Did you buy another TV?”

"It's sharper than real life!" Josue replied cheerfully. He started listing off specs, but Amelle wasn't listening. She was too busy watching what she'd just lived through not even ten minutes ago, this time from the drone's perspective. No, it -wasn’t- a Bumblebee. It was one of those sleek, self-piloting news cameras. Those didn't have the same rescue protocols programmed in, though...they were way too expensive to be wasted saving civilians, as far as most stations were concerned.

Treated to the slightly surreal experience of watching herself get tackled by a big mechanical soccer ball, Amelle once again wished she'd gotten a chance to check out the memory logs of the drone. "Why are they broadcasting this?"

She got her answer in the form an enormous, earthshaking rumble, both from the TV in front of her and the doorway. Her father steadied himself with both hands on his cybernetic leg; a cheap but handcrafted steel-and-wood contraption, it was particularly susceptible to vibrations. "Because the whole damn thing's coming down, Mel."

And so it was. The screen swapped to another drone after the one that had saved her was destroyed, displaying the events from another angle. An excitable reporter, likely glad to be covering something besides construction progress reports and crime in the higher sectors, explained that there was nothing to worry about, all was well because Pittsburgh’s cutting-edged defense force was on the case --

--And indeed, containment fields were already coming up, dozens of drones becoming hundreds as they flew in from other districts to start limiting the damage. The entire skyscraper was coming apart, pieces of rubble intercepted by magnetic pulses generated by the little flying orbs. Smaller debris was picked up entirely, to be carried off to the closest dump. Larger threats, like an entire support beam she saw come off an incomplete floor a mile up, were instead pulverized by a coordinated onslaught that broke them into more manageable parts. Pieces were still hitting the ground here and there, but it was impressive how well the drones were handling the disaster in real time. More were already circling at lower levels, warning off the few pedestrians crazy or stupid enough to still try and approach.

"That thing was fine, like, twenty minutes ago," Amelie said in surprise. "I thought it was almost done. What could have happened?" She wasn't asking out of idle fascination; her father used to be an architect.

Eyes on the screen as well, he clucked his tongue in thought. "This late in production, it's true; there's no way that this should be possible. There are only a few possibilities, and none of them are good. One is faulty materials. If the beams came from a Chinese plant, that's pretty likely, especially with the embargoes..."

Amelle rolled her eyes. "And the other, before you default to 'Blame China' again?"

"--I'm not being racist, mon cœur. There's just a lot going on right now there, and --"

He always got so awkward about this stuff when she called him out on it. Trying to stop him from rambling, Amelie held up both hands. "I get it, Dad. So what's the other possibility?" She always felt a little uncomfortable when he used Creole with her; she knew what that meant, but a lot of the time, it went over Amelie’s head. He'd always tried a lot harder than her mother to teach her the language, but they’d both lapsed on their lessons once the problems had started between her parents.

"Well, the other option is that it was on purpose. Terrorists or the like." He sounded a lot calmer about that than he did the possibility of faulty materials. Amelle supposed that was only natural; there hadn't been any attacks like that in decades in Pittsburgh.

Plus, he had a lot of friends in the architecture business who had probably contributed to this latest project. If it was faulty construction, she supposed that would reflect pretty badly on them. "Who would even bomb a building that wasn't finished?"

"Someone who had problems with the corporation running it...from what the reporters are saying, this is a Nextra-Life building."

"Weren't they just in the news for something else?" Touching at her cracked rib, Amelle sighed and headed into the bathroom. "Do we have any stims?" She called out from within, closing the door behind her.

"Should be, check the first aid kit! And yeah, now that you mention it...some protests over their new drug subscription program. You think that might be it?"

"I dunno! Probably easier to bomb an unfinished building though, less security bots." Besides, she thought to herself; if you were trying to maintain the moral high ground, making sure you were targeting somewhere guaranteed to not have any employees yet was a pretty good way to do it. If terrorists were concerned about morality. She had no idea. She’d never talked to a terrorist before.

Rolling up her plain black shirt, Amelle bit her lip and hissed at the sight of her own stomach. A purple bruise, already yellow at the edges, was blossoming across the right side of her abdomen. Opening the bathroom mirror to fish out the first aid kit, she opened it and retrieved a large syringe from within.

"Hm." She'd used these a few times before, but mostly just to accelerate the healing of large scabs and, once, a dog bite. She wasn't sure how well it would work here, but as soon as she injected it, the combination of hydromorphone and eugenia went to work numbing her pain. A bit stiff but already feeling the effects of the drugs, Amelle blinked off the haze trying to take her over and left the bathroom.

Though it had only taken her a few minutes to address her rib, her father had already fallen asleep (sitting up, impressively enough) by the time she’d returned to the living room. Knowing well he always complained about his prosthetic killing him when he slept with it on, she knelt down next to the couch and took a minute to unscrew it from the stump. Once that was handled, she grabbed a blanket from the top of the couch that she kept there for this specific reason and swung it over him. He still looked about ready to fall off if he turned wrong in his sleep, but he was massive. Not much she could do about that.

Deciding to check on the progress of the collapsing building, Amelie stepped outside. Emerging onto the balcony of the apartment building, she was greeted by a rush of dusty air and a cacophony of metal-on-metal. Hornets, a sibling model to the Bumblebee that were equipped with drills and saws, were making cuts in support beams and removing insulation. The skyscraper nearby was still coming down as if in slow motion, more drones fluttering through the open infrastructure to set precise demolition charges. Others were still using electromagnets to suspend the progress of the building’s destruction. Having apparently determined that it was damaged beyond salvation, C-MAC, the City Maintenance Corps, were going to use controlled explosions to make the whole thing collapse inward on itself over the next couple of days. Amelie had learned about this process in her Civics tutorials, but she never thought she’d see it up close like this.

Bringing down an entire skyscraper like this was a big deal, especially with its proximity to a residential district. She’d taken a field trip once to C-MAC’s headquarters in the center of the city, which had some official name that Amelie had forgotten because everyone just called it the Hive. Even on a relatively slow day, it had been full of thousands of civil engineers and maintenance workers, not to mention the fleet of drones that gave the station its nickname. During an event like this, she imagined that all hands were on deck; making an action plan, approving the use of demolitions, issuing directives to the cutting-edge AIs that piloted the drones…

Despite her proximity to what was soon to be Ground Zero, Amelie wasn’t too worried. C-MAC was incredibly precise at working this stuff out, and if they needed to evacuate, she’d not only get an alert on her HUD, but a bunch of Steel Wasps would show up. -Those- were her favorite drones, heavily armored and jet-black so that they were easily visible even when the ray-shine was strong, like it was today.

The stimpack was really kicking in now. The swirling dust and the grinding of the Hornets were blending together, lulling her increasingly towards drowsiness as she watched C-MAC work. The sharp pain in her ribcage had faded to little more than a distant throb. She was at peace, serene for the first time in weeks. Maybe I want to be an engineer, she thought to herself. This looked like something she’d be good at. Hell, she was only four months from graduation now, and her parents would both be expecting her to work by the time she was fifteen. She’d been so distracted that she hadn’t even thought about a career track. Then again, so had her mother and father. After what had happened to Chase, maybe they wouldn’t want her to work.

This, though...this was nice. Safe. Helping the community. They probably got paid pretty well, too.

Amelie startled as her phone buzzed, snapping her out of her haze. It took more effort than she cared to admit, thanks to the increasing influence of the stimpack, and when she glanced at her HUD to see who was messaging her, she wished she hadn’t bothered.

Evan, Chase’s best friend. He had been texting her a lot lately. Too much.

Sirens blared in the distance as ambulances flew towards the site of the skyscraper, which judging by the frequency and intensity of the rumbling, was only getting worse. Amelie frowned, her confidence slightly shaken. Ambulances meant injuries, and C-MAC prided itself on a 0 casualty count in all operations. Something was wrong.  If things got worse, they'd start bringing out the Steel, the city's elite peacekeeping force.

It’d be fine.

“It’ll be fine,” she said out loud.

Right?

The entire apartment building shook as the dust became blinding. Was the skyscraper getting...closer?

“Oh, no.”

Amelie turned, reaching for the door. Vertigo seized her, though, and she stumbled before reaching it. By the time she grasped the knob, a Hornet came crashing down, bouncing off the railing and fracturing on impact. One piece drove like a stake into the wall beside her, another slamming into her back, thankfully a blunt impact that nonetheless sent her to the ground with a cry of pain.

Struggling to push herself to her feet, Amelie tried to call out to her father, but the wind was knocked out of her. Another Hornet came down, smashing into the floor above her with such force that pieces rained down onto her head. Tucking her face into her chest, she scrabbled for purchase against the balcony, but a thunderous crash echoed from above, signaling that the damaged skyscraper had started falling, crashing into the residential complex in the process. Both buildings were going to come down now.

“No no no no no!”  Amelie was desperate now, regaining her breath and calling for her parents. “MOM! DAD! WE’VE GOT TO GO! WE’VE GOT TO GET OUT OF HERE!” She flinched as she heard an enormous crash from inside the apartments.

Where was her dad? He couldn’t still be asleep, could he? Through this racket?

Then she remembered that she’d taken his prosthetic off. Even if he was awake, he’d need time to put it back on. Time he might not have, because of her.

It would be her fault.

Unable to accept that thought, Amelie forced herself to her feet. She grabbed the doorknob as the entire residential skyscraper began to shake, more pieces of the balcony above falling onto her. An entire railing went sailing passed, followed swiftly by at least two entire floors from the other building. She could hear screams now, nausea overtaking her as the adrenaline coursing through her body started to clash with the sedatives from the stimpack she’d taken earlier. Forcing it down, she moved to open the door, shoving relentlessly to force a piece of debris out of the way.

Amelie opened her mouth, horrified beyond words, as she was greeted by nothingness. The crash of the incomplete tower into the top levels of the residential building had caused an enormous chain reaction, collapsing floor-after-floor as the relatively fragile wooden floors broken away from the sturdier graphene support beams. The whole thing was coming down from the inside out, and while she’d been struggling to recover outside, her living room had been caught in the destruction. Her father was nowhere to be found.

Panicked, calling out and getting no response, Amelie reached out to the fractured doorframe to steady herself as she bent forward to try and see further down. The building quaked again, though, and she lost her footing. Before she could recover, something crashed into her from behind, sending her over the edge into the plummeting ruins of her own home.

With nothing to stop her and no one to help her, Amelie fell.