Scylla and Charybdis

Ellie Janzen

Lock lay huddled up against a support rail of a magnet train, clutching his threadbare coat around his chattering shoulders. Every three minutes a locomotive would shoot across the silver bars overhead, sending hairs of blue electricity crawling around the inside of the tunnel.

Lock ducked his head as one such train flew past. The concrete column behind his back shook and hummed as electricity coursed through the wires embedded deep in the casing. Pale static light jumped through the labyrinthine structure that supported the shuttle. He caught silhouettes of his companions through the flashing electricity, echoes of himself, ghostly figures crouched like starved dogs in the corners of the tunnel.

And then the train vanished around a corner, and darkness faded onto Lock’s eyes again. A faint smell of burning copper still lingered in the air, and he pulled the collar of his ragged garments over his nose in a half-hearted attempt to filter some of the odor.

As he raised his arm, Lock heard the comp unit strapped to his wrist clunk against the cement pillar behind him. Purely out of habit, Lock lifted his forearm to his face in order to peer at the device. If in working order, Lock’s CU bracelet would be lit up like a jar of fireflies. There, right above the pulse in his wrist, would be the screen displaying his distance and direction from any of two thousand pre-programmed locations. And right beneath that was the little checkerboard of panels that he could link up to virtually any appliance, building, door, or computer in the entire city. On the top of his arm was the collection of operational switches and keys he could use to make adjustments to the device. But now, the amazing bracelet of technology sat dim and lifeless on his clammy skin.

Lock let his arm fall back to the ground. Pungent drafts sailed up and down the tunnel, sweeping away the excess heat the magnet rails created. He gritted his teeth against the cruel rushing air, curled his knees up to his chest, and closed his eyes.

Somehow, the man managed to doze between the flashing trains and cold. He slid into the semi-conscious state of the impossibly exhausted, observing the world through a lactic glaze. The next event he registered with the whole of his mind was the thin, cold hands of his brother Perry rattling him awake.

“Come on, Lock. Otis reckons he’s got an idea of where to head now, what with the advice he got from that whore.”

“You mean Sircy?” Lock murmured, lifting half of his torso forward in an effort to wake up, “We’re not goin’ back to her place again, are we?”

“No. She gave Otis directions a few days ago though, and we’ve got to get through Chrib Street tonight.”

Lock gave a tremendous groan and let his face fall into his hands. “Chrib Street? And what makes him think that that’s going to do us any good? The city moves, Perry. You can’t get directions.”

“Well…” Perry lifted his shoulders helplessly. “I don’t know what else we can really do. Got any better ideas? And you know, he did get us out of the Larcygonian Metal Works…”

“Yeah, right after he set the Feds on us!” Lock pulled himself to his feet and tugged his boots higher up his legs. “If it weren’t for him we wouldn’t even be in this mess.”

“We’ve been through this.” Perry rubbed his eyes with one hand and promptly flung himself to his stomach as another train shot overhead. Once the lethal snakes of blue light vanished with the roaring locomotive, Perry hauled Lock to his feet. “Let’s just go. Maybe this time will work out.”

Lock cursed under his breath and fumbled through the darkness to the curved inner wall of the tunnel, feeling for the maintenance ladder that ran up to the exit hatch. To judge by the noise, several other men in their party were just rousing as well.

Lock scampered up the ladder, pulled himself out of the hatch at the top, gathered his feet underneath him, stood up, and looked around.

About half of their party lounged around the roof of the tunnel, staring out at the city arching around them. It stretched up and up, with roads and cable spanning between the dull, black towers like interlacing fingers. Lock could see a small square of sky, distant and cold above their heads. As he watched, a piece of one of the nearby skyscrapers hissed, extended a thicket of mechanical arms, and crawled along one of the cables like an awkward, obese spider. Once it reached the end of the wire, the section of machinery hissed again and attached to the adjacent building to form a new addition. The old building was already rearranging to fit the vacant space, a few of the sky bridges flipped around to accommodate the new positions of the doors, and everything was still again.

Mediterranea was the greatest megalopolis on the planet, chiefly because of its renowned reconstructing ability. It stretched for over a thousand miles from east to west and seven hundred from north to south. Buildings rose thousands of feet into the air and ground, connected by spider webs of skywalks and shuttles. Nearly every structure in the city was made of connected cell blocks the size of a large house, and all of them could be moved and stuck onto other pieces like Legos. A nuclear fusion reactor that could swallow a European country was buried in the heart of the city to power the seething mechanical sprawl. At night, the lights went off, the buildings shut down, and the generator purred to life. The real estate transactions of the day were completed, moving rooms and buildings and roads to fit the needs of the city, and the layout maps updated. At dawn, the generator chugged to a halt and the solar farms at the edges of the city turned on.

Lock looked over as Otis, the cyborg captain of their wayward group, called for attention. The rest of the crew had finally made it up to the surface, and their leader strode forward. Metal planking snaked up Otis's right arm and onto his face, sending hydraulics hissing and gears clicking with every movement of his body.

“Alright men, we’re going through Chrib Street tonight.” Otis rubbed his mismatched hands together.

“Chrib Street?” One of the smaller of their members squeaked. “You mean that…that…”

“Slave market? Yup.” Otis nodded his head thoughtfully. “We need to stay in a tight group and get through fast, make sure that no one gets snatched off.” He clapped Lock, who happened to be standing next to him, on the shoulder; Lock’s knees buckled at the enormous force exerted by the mechanical limb. Otis ground his teeth thoughtfully for a minute longer before shaking his head. “Nope. Never mind. Come on, let’s get going. Everyone, there’s another service ladder to the left over there, let’s make for it.”

As everyone slumped off for another cold night of dodging through alleys, climbing buildings and scampering over cables, Lock couldn’t help but notice that Otis lingered behind the rest. He sulked in a shadow, loading—Lock realized with a jerk—weapons into his cybernetic parts.

“Come on,” said a voice at his elbow. Lock whirled around to find his brother staring disapprovingly at him. “Let him mind his own business.”

Lock grunted and followed Perry, attaching to the tail end of the train of men. But he couldn’t help glancing back at Otis as he placed a hand on the cold metal bars. What was he up to?

“Lock…” his brother growled from several rungs up.

Lock sighed and began climbing after him, hand over hand. He didn’t like this at all. But what could he do?

After two hours of weaving through the whirring, crawling city, the crew came to the entrance of a tunnel. Foul air leeched out of it, spilling the stench of evil money and dying, miserable people across the ground. Lock shivered and glanced around. Blue and purple shadows slid across the metallic landscape, inching over wires, slinking around the bases of buildings, breeding in alleys where the pinprick, blinking eyes of databanks glowed. Go back, the city seemed to whisper in his ears, go back. Wherever you were is better than here.

But Otis would have none of it. “Come on men,” he urged, striding among them. “We’ve been through worse than this! Remember when the Feds first showed up? They disconnected us and figured we'd throw up our arms and turn ourselves in! But they weren’t counting on me, my brain and my arm, were they? What about Lotus and his gang? He had half of you guys so doped up you couldn’t speak. But I got us out of that, and we’re going to get out of this too. Next thing you know we’re all going to be sitting back in our apartments, hooked up and drinking whiskey! So what do you say?”

Several of the men gave weak cheers, and the rest at least looked a little more encouraged. Still, Lock couldn’t help but think about all of their other excursions Otis had failed to mention. The Feds had killed four of their men before Otis managed to help the rest of them escape. Through one thing or another, their numbers had dwindled to almost half of what they’d been to start with.

But he had the sense not to mention any of this. If they were going through Chrib Street they were going through Chrib Street, and scaring everyone out of their boots before they even set foot in the place wouldn’t help.

Otis took the lead down into the tunnel, and the rest of his men filed in behind. For a few minutes, the strengthening reek and the scuttling of foreign footsteps were the only thing that broke the darkness. Their group shuffled and fought not to end up on the edge of their cluster, all the while racing forward with as much speed as they could manage. As they neared the midpoint of the tunnel, a low moan of trapped voices began to seep out of the floor, and lights started to flicker on.

The sickly fluorescents let the group see the ground in front of their feet and guess at the shapes to their sides. They all fled forward, Otis included, dreading some slave master’s trap that would have them in electric collars for the rest of their lives.

And then the walls exploded.

Lock shouted and lunged forward as gunfire and electric bolts shot across the passage. He could see faceless figures out of the corners of his eyes, yelling and snarling as the mouths of their weapons spat death across their path. Lock ran for all he was worth, leaping over fallen bodies, dodging around the now-illuminated pit holes and hologram wires. But just as he was nearing the end of it, just as darkness was about to swallow him again—

“PERRY!” Lock saw his brother thrown halfway across the tunnel, caught in the head by a slug of lead. Lock lunged after him only to find the chill, metallic fingers of Otis seize the back of his neck.

“No! There’s no helping him! Keep moving!”

Otis had to drag Lock out of Chrib Street and back into the shadowy alleys of Mediterranea. What remained of the group lay collapsed on the cement, shuddering, faces dripping tears and sweat.

“You knew!” Lock shouted, thrashing against Otis’s grip. “You knew what was waiting down there! You knew and you let us walk right into it!”

“I’m sorry.” Otis released Lock and the man crumpled to the pavement, sobbing. “Yes, I knew. Sircy told me that there were gang wars going on in Chrib Street. But what good would telling you have done? We would have had no way to fight them off.”

“MY BROTHER IS DEAD!” Lock shrieked. He faced the sky from his knees, his head thrown back and hands crunched into his hair. “Perry’s dead because he trusted you! You and your bravo and ego!”

Lock choked as a mechanical hand closed around his collar. “Do you think I enjoyed doing that?” Otis growled. “Do you think I haven’t been cracking my bolts to get everyone reconnected again? If you go pinning this on me—”

“Oh, then you’ll what?” Lock let out a high, cackling laugh. “Kill us? We’re all going to die, Otis, and it’s your fault! You can’t beat the Feds. We’re going to be stuck out in these godforsaken slums until our twitching bodies rot! Just you see, just you—”

CLANG. Lock was thrown backwards as an uppercut from Otis’s metal fist met his jawbone. He heard his jaw break as he smashed against the pavement, skidding ten feet on his back. His vision flickered in and out, and the inky square of sky above his head danced.

“Don’t,” Sious snarled from somewhere above him, “challenge me again. What happened wasn’t my fault, and anyone who says it is will have something coming their way.”

Lock would have replied, but his broken jaw rendered him unable to speak. Blood leaked out of the side of his mouth, pooling on the rough pavement. He could hear the city shifting; he could feel the inert CU pressing into his wrist; he could smell the stench Crib Street where his brother’s body lay. It was hopeless. Utterly hopeless.