Wake

The cold air pierced the guards core when she cleared the airlock. She felt compelled to huddle his hands around her mouth, to warm them on her exhaled breath. She fought this urge, since that required moving the air filtration mask aside, and that was not going to happen. She hated this detail. It was going to be the damned death of her, she knew. This deep in heaven and there was no way she wouldn't catch something, even if it was in the wake of the platform.

She peered over the side, barely making out the net that surrounded Amp's lower half. At night it lit up in a cross-stitched pattern that could be seen for kilometers around. It was never truly dark in Amp. Now, in the early afternoon it was a thin mesh of thread bellowing in the mist.

Securing the baton at her waist, she took hold of the hand rail and began the slow march along the catwalk. It was going to be a long shift. If she had given it any forethought she may have backed out of that card game. Still convinced the game had been rigged, she felt like kicking herself in the head for not realizing that she was being baited along. Now that she was stuck with an extra shift, she really wanted to kick the other guy in the head. Or the teeth.

Slamming down her fist on the hand rail brought her back from her reverie. Though no guard in Amp would admit to having even the mildest case of vertigo, day dreaming out on perimeter could become rather unpleasant if ones footing became confused at the wrong moment. Sighing with resolve, the guard continued her march.

The mid-afternoon shift was responsible for checking the turbines and ventilation shafts. She wasn't exactly sure what function they served, since no one would want to breath the air down here. Rumors said that the Order used them to collect the damned stuff for some sort of processing deep in the guts of the city. She didn't care either way. What she did know was the damage a stray dragon could cause if it found an opening in one of the shafts. It only took one complete district blacking out for the city guard to take on this responsibility.

An hour later she came to her first way station. It was a small box of a building, not more than four meters to a side. Each station is attached to the main platform by a track that attaches on the bottom of the room. In the case of an emergency the room would become an elevator that would proceed up the track and into a holding area where the occupants would wait to be retrieved. The city guard knew how ridiculous the mechanism really was. Even if the stations still worked, there would be no rescue party. No one knew how to use the comm interface, and most of the lower city was quarantined by the Order. Despite their uselessness, they served as break areas for guards working the perimeter, so she was thankful. With any luck the last shift left behind some warm food. At the very least she would get out of the open air for a bit.

Inside she found shelves stocked with bags of water along one wall, and small table shoved into the corner, a pile of foil bagged strewn across it. Shoving her weight against the door to make sure it shut completely, she slid down to the floor, her arms hugging her legs to her for warmth. The station was surprisingly well insulated, and soon she could feel the numbness leaving her appendages, leaving them sore and heavy. She slowly rocked back and forth, suddenly jumping up in one motion. The card game had lasted late into the morning, and she was feeling it. Better to move about to avoid falling asleep. She still had two more stations to visit before this shift was over, and she could probably sneak in a nap at her last stop.

Stretching her arms above her head and stifling a yawn, she walked over to the console bay. Unzipping her jacket halfway, she pulled a small canister out of her jacket. One end of the memory stick was a cap that protected the interface connectors inside. Twisting until she heard the familiar click, and then pulling the cap off with a soft pop, she slid back the casing window that protected the interface port on the console bay and lightly stabbed the memory drive in. The screen flicked on, two blinking underscores appearing in the upper corners. She pulled off a glove and began pecking her login. After she put in her name and ID number, she removed her other glove, impatient to type out her 30-digit password with one hand.

Finishing her login she put in the command without looking at the prompt. She and some of the guards had taken it upon themselves to write a small script that ran all of the programs that mounted the memory drive and download the content of the consoles small cache. She noticed the light on the side of the canister began blinking green in sync with the text being output to the monitor. The left cursor moved right leaving behind a trail of characters. It stopped halfway across the monitor before vanishing and reappearing at the left side, streaming line after line of logins and times. At the same time the right cursor moved down, intricate kanji falling down the screen until it reached halfway down the screen. Like its horizontal counterpart it began a new line at the top, moving left one line in each iteration, until meeting the edge of the of the time logs. These upper two quadrants quickly filled up with text, and began pushing the first lines off screen as the cursors continued churning out characters.

Being two quick to read as it was being uploaded to the memory drive, she instead looked at the bottom of the screen. On the lower right were the statistics for the station. Temperature outside and in, average wind speed, supply drop-off times. The last time water had been delivered here was over three years ago. She sneered at the prospect of how awful it must taste, if it didn't her outright. The food packets, however, had been brought in by the morning shift the day prior. She had skipped breakfast to make it to her shift on time, her disdain for station food being overruled by her stomach's insistence for nourishment.

Taking off her air filtration mask and helmet she ran her hand back over her head and tugged on her pony-tail. It had become loose, and she would have to put it back up before leaving the station. Tossing the gear on top of the monitor she noticed the green light had become red on the memory drive. Expecting the yellow that signified her drive uploading its info to the console, she wiped the helmet and mask aside to see what alert the console was given. In the lower left quadrant there was a listing of messages. All except one had been read, with the last one being highlighted as new.

The skin around her eyes tightened as she squinted at the line. There was no sender information, nor was there any time-stamp. There was only a subject, two characters that took her a moment to comprehend:

The characters meant danger. Her hand moved to the keyboard, but she stopped short of loading the message. She made a scan of the room. Holding her breath she strained against her heartbeat to hear the tale-tell whistling of a crack in the wall. She looked over at the emergency panel that would activate the retraction mechanism, sealing her up inside the platform. Convinced it had not been tampered with she turned her attention to the message. As she confirmed her selection that quadrant of the screen scaled to fill the entire monitor. Just then her memory drive chose to sync its data with the console, slowing the rendering of the message on the screen. The header loaded, all fields empty except of the subject.

The message began to write, the yellow light blinking rapidly as the interface bandwidth filled with time-stamps and logs. A character appeared.

b

Her eyes shot back up to the subject line, as if she had misread the subject line. The symbols read the same, her attention being drawn to the second character being written.

4

Thinking quickly, she tried to remember the procedures she did at the stations. She was familiar with l-users using chat speak on some boards she frequented, but she couldn't imagine what was dangerous, or what it would be "before". She looked at the memory drive, fighting the urge to rip it out. She knew it would likely crash the console. She looked back in time to see the next character.

k

Convinced it wasn't an abbreviation, she wracked her brain for an answer. There was no reason for it to be encrypted. Perhaps it wasn't for her, and it was a special code for someone else. After waiting a few moments and not seeing any more characters appear, she began cursing the memory drive. A system sound beeped from a small speaker in the console, signaling the memory drive was done. She looked at the monitor in time to see the cursor write out the rest of the message.

> b4k4 ^_^

b4k4. Baka. Fool.

She slammed her fist against the console, visibly distorting the text on the screen. Tightly gripping the memory drive with her fist, she yanked the device from the port, nearly breaking off the tip in the process.

"Fucking otaku."