Chapter Ten – More Questions than Answers
byChapter Ten – More Questions than Answers
“By 2020, China was well on its way to becoming the world’s second superpower.
By 2025, the country was in turmoil, plagued by economic instability (much of it caused by a global recession where many countries simply stopped importing goods), social unrest, and a growing feud between the ruling party and the few Samurai in the country.
Most major shifts in global affairs past 2020 can be linked in one way or another to a Samurai, or a group of them, but China’s near-collapse is the most obvious of these.
In 2022, an incursion appeared over Fujian. The reaction of the government was, surprisingly, positive. By then many other global powers had their own Samurai, and China was looking forward to obtaining its own.
The incursion went poorly, with the first mass appearance of Model Sevens. Someone, and it is still unknown who was responsible, authorized the use of low-yield nuclear weapons over the province.
It secured a victory, but at the cost of nearly all local Samurai.
In the following year, another pair of incursions appeared over the area: in Taiwan, and near Hong Kong. The Samurai born from these did not share an enthusiastic relationship with the Chinese government. By 2030, the area was governed by three countries, two of which were, and still are, under the protection of local Samurai warlords. The Democratic Republic of Hong Kong, the Independent Republic of Taiwan, and the People’s Republic of China.”
–A History After the Drop, Online Lecture by Professor Sterne
***
I grinned at all the workers. “Where’s your manager?” I asked.
It took all of a minute for some sweaty middle-aged woman to jog over to meet me in the same corridor I’d almost been shot in. “H-hello,” she said as she caught her breath. “How can I help?”
“Well, first, you can explain what’s going on here,” I said with a gesture to the workers behind her. They’d stopped breaking into apartments and emptying them to stare at our little spectacle.
“We’re checking the area for xenos, ma’am,” the manager said.
I stared at her, then at the cart laden with computers and televisions and tablets. “Have the aliens been disguising themselves as PCs while I wasn’t paying attention?” I asked.
The woman straightened. “It’s within our charter to recover any valuables left in the area.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “You’re not even tagging them or anything. There’s no way that someone that lives here will be able to tell their stuff apart from anyone else’s.”
“There are ways to recoup any lost belongings,” the woman said. She didn’t look comfortable saying it, and it only took a second of meeting her eyes to communicate that we both knew how full of shit she was.
“You guys can leave the rest of the stuff where it is,” I said. “And leave the cart too.”
She hesitated. I could almost see the math working itself out behind her eyes. She was no doubt going to be losing a lot of credit with this, but I found myself with few fucks to give. “I, of course, we’ll clear out right away.”
“Good. Now, I’m looking for someone. Myalis, can you send her a photo?”
Of course. Consider it sent.
The manager shook her head. “Never seen her. One moment.” She had me nervous for a moment as she reached into a big pocket, but it was only to retrieve a tablet. Soon she was clicking through images. Faces, some bloody, others not. Most with their eyes closed, and all obviously dead.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“One of our duties here is clearing out the dead. There aren’t usually that many, but some xenos did make it over here.”
I nodded. I’d seen as much with what little footage of Katallina I’d seen. “You keep a catalogue of the dead?” I asked.
She nodded absently while still scrolling past pictures. “The dead, and their IDs if we can find them. I can’t find anyone fitting the bill. The only person that looks about the right age is this boy.”
She turned the tablet over so that I could take in an image of a boy, maybe Junior’s age, with a nice set of augs and a face covered in dried blood. “Right,” I said. “Did you guys see anything suspicious?”
“No,” she said.
One of the guys shuffled, and I turned over to stare at him.
He froze up. “I-I might have, uh, seen something?” he said.
“Spill,” I said.
The man swallowed. “We found bullet casings on this floor. Um, lots of them, near some dead antithesis. No guns though, and no bodies.”
It could be just anything. Someone with a fancy gun or two that came out to help with the aliens came around. Or it could be Katallina. She had a gun on her in that little bit of footage I saw.
“Got any pictures or video of the casings and bodies?” I asked.
He nodded and looked over to his manager.
“We’ll send it to you as soon as it’s processed,” the woman said.
“Good,” I said. “We can all wait here while that happens.”
She looked like someone that had just swallowed something sour. “I’ll… see what I can do,” she said before returning to tap at her device. “It’s a lot of data to sift through.”
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
“I’m pretty sure my AI can manage.”
I’d say that your faith in me is reassuring, but really, there are only a few terabytes to sort through. It’s child’s play.
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