Chapter Four – Below the City

Chapter Four – Below the City

“Hex-platforming is a technique that became popular in the late 20s. It involves creating a set of six large pillars to hold up the corners of a hex. The hex’s size varies, but it’s usually between 100 and 200 metres from point to point. Buildings are built above these, and the gap between the hex platforms and the ground allow for plenty of space where infrastructure can be laid out. Sewers, electrical grids, any kind of interconnecting system.

Now new cities are built to sprawl out more, and have extensive above-ground piping and networking. It’s not much better. At least in a hex city, the superpoor are entirely out of sight.”

–The Hex, by Professor of Engineering Duskland, 2041

***

The taxi dove down, and down, and then even lower down, slowing all the while as the driver went from just a little nervous to an outright wreck, hunched over the wheel and with his eyes roving all over to look for danger.

I didn’t blame him.

The orphanage where I’d done a lot of my growing up had been on the ground level, near the outskirts of the city. Ground level was, generally, bad news. It’s where all the people who fell from above ended up. A lot of the chemicals in the air were heavy, and they tended to seep down too.

No one wanted to live so low, so those that did have to live there weren’t often there by choice. They were the slums, built in and around the pillars holding up the massive towers that hid the sun from view.

Right now, we were below that.

The city had been an island, once, but that was decades ago. Someone had terraformed it, built a new ‘ground’ onto which to build the rest of the city. Everything under that wasn’t fit for living in; it was all pipes and earthquake absorption shocks and pillars dug deep into the earth to hold the weight of everything above.

When we started to dive, we’d been in a nicer area. Gomorrah didn’t seem like a slum-raised kind of girl. Now, about thirty floors below that, we were in hell.

Horizontal smokestacks were spewing some vapours onto the road, the clouds of smoke being torn apart as cars which didn’t look street legal raced past. Bigger trucks were moving by, some taking the ramps leading up to the ground level. Most of those were being escorted by little drones.

“It’s a bit above this,” the driver said. He gestured up to a hole in the ceiling above that cut through the ground level, but never reached the sky. The interior of a hollow skyscraper?

By the looks of it, it was one of those industrial ones. The sort that was a windowless box from the outside. I guess it made sense that they’d move things in and out where no one could see it happening.

The cab rose up and we started to navigate through a maze of catwalks and suspended roads, the path marked out by rings of green light, at least where the lights hadn’t been torn off and stolen.

“There it is,” the driver said. I don’t know if that was relief in his voice or not. He pulled us up and around to a hole in the wall, the faded words ‘employee parking’ next to it.

A bazaar had been tacked on to the sides of the hollow interior, catwalks leading to little booths and shops suspended over the void.

We came to a stop, not quite parking alongside the other cars. I guessed the driver wanted an easy path to rush out of if things went south.

“Alright,” I said as I pushed the door open. Judging by the way my helmet’s augs flashed and switched to tanked air and the way the driver’s nose wrinkled up, the place didn’t smell rosy. “I’ll give you a call if I need to get out,” I said.

“My shift ends now,” he said. “Not working tomorrow.”

“Uh, alright?” I stepped out, boots squelching into some muck as I shifted my weight to move. “Myalis, can you give him a good tip?”

The author’s content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Certainly.

“See you around!” I said as the taxi driver put pedal to metal and rushed out of the parking area with a squeal of his car’s engine..