"In the opposite direction, bordering Ataris, lay Keldaraan—Vega Prime’s filthiest and poorest worker district. But at these heights, three hundred meters above ground, all one could see was a vast, gray-black industrial cloudscape. It stretched across the entire district, churning, roiling, and smoldering. The electromagnetic radiation visible to the human eye was powerless against the thick clouds, dense with myriads of pollutant particles. Only in infrared could one make out the sprawling industrial complexes, the power plants, the storage containers, and the misery within.

  Suddenly, a tremor was recorded in the log, and 2.21 tenths of a second later, the sound of a projectile reached the sensors. In air, at an external temperature of 23 degrees Fahrenheit, the speed of sound per 1.25 tenths of a second was reduced to just 373.3 feet. A marksman had fired precisely from a distance, taking a shot from inside a building. The calculated muzzle velocity was 2.77101 times the speed of sound, measuring exactly 2,986 feet per second—which pointed to only one possible model: the W8V2 assault rifle, the weapon of choice for the Crimson Dawn terrorist group.

  The drone had flown directly over a resistance nest before crashing onto the street just two apartment blocks away. Cal Rook leapt aside at the very last second. Like a shrapnel explosion, scrap and metal fragments tore past him at a murderous speed.

  It took a moment before he could shake off his catatonic paralysis and dare to open his eyes again. He glanced down at himself in disbelief. The drone hadn’t crushed him. The flying debris hadn’t shredded him to pieces.

  Nothing. Not a single scratch, he thought. The holes in his shabby work clothes had already been there before.

  Hesitantly, he stepped toward the smoking impact site. The asphalt beneath his feet was split open. Acrid smoke billowed toward him, thick with the stench of burning plastic and motor oil. Pulling the frayed neckline of his sweater over his nose, he circled the crash site, then crouched down, positioning himself upwind from the high-tech scrap heap. He studied the wreckage through the swirling smoke and falling snow.

  ‘What the hell is this?’

  Dozens of logos from well-known food brands were plastered across the upper and lower surfaces of the drone’s heavy frame. It was a corporate property, belonging to BeMo Company, his employer. He had heard of these things before. They patrolled the districts outside Keldaraan, circling the places where there was still something worth taking. Their primary function was to track the buying habits of Vega Prime’s citizens, collecting all kinds of customer data to fuel the ad industry. Personalized advertising drove consumer spending more than anything.

  But never before had a marketing drone strayed into Keldaraan, where people could barely afford anything at all.

  The drone’s head was connected to its body by a simple joint. A mechanical whirring sound filled the air as the head slowly lifted into its highest possible position and locked in place.

  For a brief moment, it seemed as though the camera mounted at the front was staring directly into his eyes. The drone was observing him. And somehow, it almost seemed like it was…

  …feeling something?

  Suddenly, a compartment on the side popped open. A storage device ejected.

  The black box.

  He hesitated. Thought about it. Searched the glowing red camera eye for an answer to whether this was really what he was supposed to do—take the data recorder.

  Inside the drone’s body, a fire smoldered, slowly melting its circuits, cables, and processors. The camera’s light glowed through the swirling smoke, gazing at him with an almost desperate plea.

  Take it.

  Slowly, he reached through the smoke and grabbed the flight recorder. The moment his fingers closed around the small device, the light in the drone’s eye faded.

  He wasn’t sure how much of his own emotions he was projecting onto the scene, but the drone shutting down felt strangely… peaceful. As if it had fulfilled its final duty, completed its purpose, and could now leave this world.

  A herald, delivering a royal mission to the hero.

  His dumbfounded expression was probably the last thing the sensors had recorded.

  He sat there for a moment, stunned, turning the small flight recorder over in his hands, inspecting it from both sides.

  This thing holds every bit of data BeMo has collected on people and corporations. Maybe even the answer to why a marketing drone had been flying over Keldaraan in the first place.

  Thoughts of revelation and revolution clashed inside his head (alongside fear and gnawing doubt).

  ‘Change is good for some,’ he muttered, almost as if comforting himself, ‘but rarely for the ones who make it happen.’

  With that thought, he tossed the flight recorder into the burning wreckage of the dying marketing drone.

  As his racing heartbeat slowed, and the familiar weight of exhaustion returned, he simply kicked aside the debris blocking his path to the factory.

  It had been a shitty morning like any other—except this time, it had nearly killed him."

  "So the story could’ve had a happy ending right from the start?"

  "What do you mean by ‘happy ending’?"

  The boy sat cross-legged, absentmindedly fidgeting with his fingers. Then he looked up, eyes wandering to the Wolf Glider logo on the electrician’s jumpsuit. "Just like I said," he replied. "That guy could’ve taken down BeMo’s boss with the data on that black box... if he hadn’t burned it, but leaked it instead. The drone recorded everything that happened up on Cyberworld’s terrace. The phone call about the escaped slave, the sickening stuff with the girls…"

  "With the intel the ad drone gathered on him and his preferences, Sir Alvise really would’ve been forced out of the board and straight into prison. Well, at least half the time. He would’ve spent nights in a cell and walked free every morning. For a few months, maybe." CR shook his head. "But Cal never wanted to take on BeMo’s CEO. All that mattered to him was protecting his little island of peace from the filth around it. The world inside that container... the one he built with his Parthenope and their unborn child."

  "Cal was expecting a kid?"

  "A boy, yeah."

  "Still. He was just too scared to change anything."

  "He gave up. Accepted things as they were. And tried to make the best of it. With his ten percent employee discount on groceries as Employee of the Year and his own living container, while most workers crammed into cheap factory dorms or the surrounding tent camps, he considered himself lucky. He didn’t believe in the power of resistance. Didn’t believe things would ever get better for the workers, not while human greed still outpaced human reason. The world is exactly how it’s always been. And how it’s always been is how it will always stay. So why keep fighting? He wasn’t the kind of guy to dedicate his life to change. He would’ve rather worked himself to death for BeMo if it meant he could return to his container every night, back to Parthenope. He loved her more than anything."

  Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

  The technician lifted his gaze toward the sky as if there were something up there worth looking at. But there was nothing. Just the gliders passing overhead. The platform continued its descent into the seemingly endless depths. Then, his eyes wandered.

  "Things didn’t go well for Cal after that," he said.

  "What happened to him?"

  Silence.

  "Fate ran its course."

  "After a fifteen-hour shift, he rolled the cleaning cart back into the locker room. As soon as he stepped inside and shut the door behind him, the ground beneath his feet began to tremble—just as it had so often lately. The metal locker doors rattled, and mingling with the vibrations in the walls came eerie sounds, distant and mournful, like the echoes of far-off wailing.

  He shook his head, rubbing the goosebumps from his arms. It was just his brain projecting human voices onto unfamiliar sounds—an auditory pareidolia. There had to be a logical explanation for it, he told himself. But still, his heart hammered beneath his sweater as long as those eerie noises seeped from the walls.

  When the shaking finally ceased and the walls and floor went still, he acted as if the tremor had been nothing more than a fleeting moment of unease. Yet, he lingered a little longer, his knees unsteady, before glancing at the holographic task list on his PDA and continuing forward.

  As he walked past, his eyes flicked toward the massive concrete pillar beside him. Mounted there, encased in a gold-colored frame, was the iconic photo of BeMo Company's rise to power.

  The image captured the company’s founder standing beside Dr. Tronstad and the cow Bj?rn, posing in front of a small family butcher shop. The chairman of LeverGen had an arm slung over Sir Alvise's shoulder, while Sir Alvise himself patted the cow’s back, grinning widely at the camera. A cigar clenched between his teeth.

  The photo had been taken nearly seventy years ago, back when Sir Alvise still wore his signature nickel-framed glasses but had yet to acquire any augmentations. A time when BeMo was still an obscure butcher shop—and Bj?rn wasn’t yet a mass-produced copy of itself.

  BeMo's rise began with its partnership with LeverGen.

  Cal exhaled a quiet sigh as his gaze drifted away from the photo.

  'Just this one last room,' he muttered. 'Then I’m finally done. Finally going home.'

  He crouched in the communal showers, yanking a slimy clump of hair from a drain. A putrid stench wafted up from the pipes. The clog was so bad, not even a plunger could clear it.

  In the storage room, he swept the empty cleaner bottles off a metal shelf in one motion, letting them tumble into a plastic bag. He tied it shut and set it on the floor.

  In the corner of the storage room crouched a plastic cylinder, silent, almost as if it were hiding. It hadn’t been there yesterday. Things often slipped past his perception filter. Even on streets he’d walked down dozens of times, he kept discovering new details. Just a few days ago, he had crossed the northeastern Paxson Loop to buy a pack of rolling tobacco, only to notice—for the first time—the towering 80-meter-high water tank. Shaped like an upside-down cone, it loomed between the black apartment blocks, as out of place as a rainbow over a power plant.

  But this was different. The storage room wasn’t the wide-open world out there... it was his little domain. And he was certain the cylinder had never been there before.

  He pressed a button on its side, and the lid folded open like a fan. Inside, several bottles of the same cleaning product were neatly arranged. He picked one up and inspected it.

  The label read:

  New in stock!

  MAJOR NATURE

  Dissolves everything, erases everything—completely natural!

  He turned the bottle over skeptically. A long list of ingredients covered the back. His eyes scanned the text, his expression twisting in disgust.

  ‘What a joke,’ he muttered. ‘All-natural ingredients? And a dissolving power of seven? That’s barely stronger than a citrus candy.’

  His backpack lay between his locker and the tied-up garbage bag, slumped, empty, looking like a pile of dirty laundry. He crouched, loosened the strap, and let one of the new cleaner bottles slip into the main compartment. Then he tightened the straps again and rubbed his hands together.

  A softie cleaner like this might polish the company’s image, but that’s about it. Wouldn’t be surprised if they wanted to photograph me with this useless eco-junk for PR. But hey, Parthenope will love it. She’s all about that nature stuff. Save the environment. Save the clone animals. Save the people. The flowers. The rocks. Just stuff your lousy credits into corporate pockets.

  His cleaning cart held his cleaner of choice: a black bottle of Dranox Power with 20% NaOH and 15% H?O?. He let the thick gel flow into the drain, then added a few drops of concentrated sulfuric acid to the clog.

  For a moment, he watched the foam bubbles rise through the grate, inhaled the sharp, biting scent, and listened to the chemical reaction as it oxidized.

  Then, suddenly, the door swung open.

  He jerked in surprise, shot to his feet. Supervisor Larry strode in, flanked by a squad of security guards. He limped forward step by step into the communal showers. His blond hair was pulled into a ponytail, glasses perched on his nose, and a simple paper mask covered his mouth—a precaution against the flu wave. He was tall, and his left leg was made of metal. Not a high-tech cybernetic prosthetic, just a basic metal limb. He had lost the real one in an accident at the meat factory.

  ‘Six-three-one,’ Larry paused to check his data. ‘Seven-four-nine-three-zero.’

  ‘Here, sir. But it’d save everyone a lot of time if you just called me Cal.’

  ‘There he is, our employee of the year,’ Larry said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. He spread his arms as if welcoming his favorite worker into an embrace. ‘Nobody scrubs floors like you, but other than that, you’re not the sharpest tool in the shed, huh? Let me give you some free advice: don’t make dumb suggestions. Saves the cleaning crew a lot of trouble.’

  He casually patted the stun baton hanging from a loop on his belt.

  ‘Got it, sir,’ Cal said.

  ‘Good. Now shut up and get your lazy ass over to the meat grinders. The third drain is clogged. Can’t miss it, workers are standing ankle-deep in blood.’

  ‘I wasn’t even assigned there today.’

  ‘You are now.’

  ‘Anything would be better than that, sir. That’s a thirty-minute walk from here. I’ve been busting my ass since six-thirty. Show a little mercy.’

  ‘I do. Just not for you.’

  ‘What about Drake, sir?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘I mean, Drake’s scheduled for the shift after mine. He should be here any minute.’

  ‘Drake’s gone.’

  ‘Gone, sir? What happened?’

  ‘Security dragged him out of his hole yesterday.’

  ‘Out of his container?’

  ‘Out of his hole. That’s what I said.’

  ‘Right, sir, I got that, but—’

  ‘He was hiding in a sewer tunnel for the past two nights. The rat was part of that new resistance group. That...’

  ‘Crimson Dawn,’ Cal blurted out before he could stop himself. He cursed inwardly. Why the hell had he said that? Quickly, he added, ‘And what about Dante?’

  ‘Eight-nine-nine-five-one-seven-three-one is missing. The external cameras haven’t picked him up since his late shift three days ago. Which means he must still be somewhere inside the factory. Wouldn’t be the first to get lost in the long corridors of that sector.’

  Cal raised an eyebrow. The year before last, a pregnant worker had collapsed from exhaustion and fallen straight into one of the meat grinders. Officially, she had 'disappeared without a trace,' though everyone knew what had really happened. The assembly line workers were ordered to keep quiet, and the machines did what they were built to do: they kept running, day in, day out. Just like Hobbler-Larry’s left leg, she had ended up processed into minced meat, packed into thousands of canned goods.

  ‘And before you ask about Six-one-three-one-four-seven-seven-five—’

  ‘Trenton, sir?’

  ‘Fired,’ the supervisor said.

  Cal hesitated. ‘And what did she do?’

  ‘Got the shits.’

  Supervisor Larry adjusted the metal strip on his face mask with his thumb and forefinger, pressing it firmly against the bridge of his nose, as if just saying the word could infect him.

  ‘Everyone’s got the holiday shits,’ Cal said. ‘You should’ve seen the toilets this morning. The whole place was painted brown. I mean, it’s either the runs or the flu. That’s how it is here in winter.’

  ‘The difference,’ Larry said, ‘is that Six-one-three-one-four-seven-seven-five, unlike the rest of the sick workers, didn’t show up yesterday. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off the clock. Taking my new girlfriend to Ataris for dinner. Beautiful district, let me tell you. We’ll be dining like royalty on the generation ship, the UNION, and afterward, I’m going to propose. Do you have a wife?’

  Cal, a little surprised (and a little suspicious that the supervisor was suddenly talking about personal matters) replied, ‘Soon, sir. She’s still my fiancée.’

  Larry’s mouth twitched in something that almost resembled approval. ‘Then you should take her there sometime,’ he said.

  Cal glanced down at the shower drain. ‘Right, sir. We’ve been saving for three years just to afford a trip there. But first, we’re expecting a baby.’ He hesitated. ‘...sir?’

  The supervisor and his guards had already left the communal showers. Cal only heard the mechanical hum of the door sliding open and then closing again.

  His gaze drifted. Mounted on a pillar in front of him was the framed photo of himself as Employee of the Year. For the picture, they had given him a decent shirt and a borrowed blazer, and he had been forced to smile into the camera. That had been even harder than squeezing into the blazer. But in the end, he had felt proud... proud of the photo, proud of himself, proud of his work.

  He turned on the shower, let the cold water crash onto the tiles for a moment, then shut off the mixer valve again. The water gurgled as it drained away. Problem solved, but quitting time was still a long way off. A few more hours of overtime stood between him and home.

  He placed the Dranox Power bottle back on the cleaning cart, left his backpack in the storage room, and locked the door.

  ‘Alright then,’ he said. ‘Let’s deal with the next clog.’"