The Dead Box

  Elias slammed his bloody palm against the bio-metric scanner next to the glass elevator. Nothing happened. The sleek panel remained dark. No green light, no hydraulic hiss.

  He leaned his forehead against the cold glass, closing his eyes as a wave of dizziness washed over him. The adrenaline was completely gone now, leaving behind a body that was running on fumes, fractured bones, and sheer, stubborn willpower.

  "Dead," Elias muttered. He tapped the glass with his rusted wrench. It made a hollow, pathetic sound. "The EMP from the Monolith’s thermal shock didn't just fry the antenna. It blew the local grid. The primary shafts are locked down."

  The Stranger flickered into view beside him, standing perfectly still in the morning drizzle. "THE TOWER IS OPERATING ON EMERGENCY BACKUP POWER. ELEVATORS ARE DISABLED TO PREVENT FIRE-TRAP SCENARIOS. THE ONLY WAY DOWN IS THE CENTRAL MAINTENANCE STAIRWELL."

  Elias let out a slow, agonizing breath. "Fifty floors. Down."

  "GRAVITY WILL ASSIST," The Stranger noted, unhelpfully.

  "Gravity is going to kill me," Elias corrected.

  He turned away from the elevator and looked at The Consultant. The former Architect of Sector 4 was still sitting on the wet concrete, staring blankly at a puddle. The rain had plastered his expensive gray hair to his skull. He looked small. Pitiful.

  Logic—cold, hard data analysis—dictated that Elias should leave him here. The man was dead weight. The Capital’s drone had already marked the roof. Leaving The Consultant would increase Elias’s chances of survival by at least sixty percent.

  But Elias wasn't a machine. He had just blown up a machine to prove that humanity was better than cold logic.

  "Hey," Elias croaked, limping over to the catatonic man. He grabbed The Consultant by the lapels of his ruined suit and hauled him upward.

  The Consultant didn't resist. He stood up on shaky legs, swaying like a toddler. His eyes were wide, but they were focused on something a thousand miles away. He let out a soft, whimpering sound, a physical manifestation of the millions of voices currently echoing inside his archived mind.

  "I know it's loud in there," Elias said, wrapping the man's arm over his own shoulder. The added weight made Elias’s broken ribs grind together. He bit the inside of his cheek to keep from screaming, tasting fresh blood. "But we have to walk. You broke the world, so now you have to walk in it."

  Together, the broken analyst and the empty billionaire began the long, agonizing shuffle toward the heavy steel fire door at the edge of the roof.

  The Long Dark

  Elias kicked the fire bar. The heavy door groaned open, revealing the throat of the Tower.

  The maintenance stairwell was pitch black. The emergency lighting strips along the baseboards were flickering a sickly, dying yellow. The air inside smelled of stale ozone, dust, and old copper. It was completely silent, insulated by feet of concrete from the screaming city outside.

  Elias pulled his cheap plastic lighter from his pocket and flicked it. The small orange flame cast long, trembling shadows against the cinderblock walls.

  "Step," Elias commanded, guiding The Consultant’s foot to the first metal grate.

  They began the descent. Floor 50 to 49 took two minutes. Floor 49 to 48 took five.

  Every time Elias’s boot hit a metal stair, the shockwave traveled straight up his leg and detonated in his chest. He was sweating profusely, his vision narrowing into a dark tunnel lit only by the tiny orange flame.

  The Consultant was no help. He stumbled constantly, tripping over his own expensive leather shoes. Sometimes he would stop completely, his face contorting in sudden, secondhand agony as a particularly violent memory from the city’s archive surfaced in his mind. Elias had to physically drag him down the steps during those moments.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  By the time they reached Floor 45, Elias was leaving bloody handprints on the concrete wall.

  "I can't," Elias gasped, collapsing onto the small landing. He dropped the lighter. It clattered against the metal grating, plunging them into the sickly yellow gloom of the emergency strips.

  The Consultant sank down next to him, curling his knees to his chest and rocking slowly back and forth, humming a tuneless, discordant melody.

  The Stranger appeared, hovering over the railing, looking down into the abyss of the stairwell. "HEART RATE CRITICAL. CORTISOL LEVELS FATAL. YOU ARE EXPERIENCING SYSTEMIC SHOCK, ELIAS."

  "I need a minute," Elias wheezed, resting his head against the cold cinderblock. "Just... one minute."

  The Monster in the Dark

  A sound echoed up from the darkness below.

  Elias froze. He stopped breathing. It wasn't the mechanical whir of an automated turret. It wasn't the heavy, synchronized marching of the Wardens they had fought on Floor 10.

  It was the sound of someone weeping. A deep, ragged, guttural sobbing that echoed off the concrete walls.

  Elias grabbed his wrench, ignoring the scream of his ribs, and forced himself to stand. He nudged the lighter with his boot, keeping it unlit, and peered over the railing.

  Two flights down, on the landing of Floor 43, a massive shadow was slumped against the wall.

  It was a Warden. The Tower’s elite guards were terrifying physical specimens—men who had been surgically augmented with subdermal armor, hydraulic limb assists, and heavy neural-dampening helmets that stripped away their humanity and turned them into remote-controlled golems.

  Elias had nearly died fighting just two of them on the lower floors.

  But this Warden wasn't standing at attention. He had torn his heavy tactical helmet off. It lay on the floor, the visor cracked. The Warden was looking at his own hands. Specifically, the hydraulic crushing gauntlets bolted onto his forearms.

  "What did I do?" the giant man sobbed, his voice cracking with raw, unfiltered terror. "Oh god, my arms. Where are my arms?"

  Without the Monolith’s signal, the Warden’s neural block had evaporated. The man inside the machine had just woken up. He was suddenly aware of the horrific surgeries he had undergone, the metallic weight of his own body, and the blood on his metal hands.

  The De-escalation

  Elias tightened his grip on the wrench. If he dropped the heavy iron tool on the Warden’s head from two flights up, he could probably kill him or knock him out. It was the tactical play. It was the math.

  But Elias looked at the man weeping in the dark. He wasn't a monster anymore. He was a victim who had just been handed a twenty-year bill of trauma.

  Elias lowered the wrench. "Stranger," Elias whispered. "Don't manifest. Stay quiet. Let me handle this."

  Elias picked up his lighter, flicked it on, and deliberately scuffed his boot against the metal stairs.

  The Warden’s head snapped up. Even through the tears, his augmented reflexes were terrifyingly fast. The hydraulic servos in his legs whined as he launched himself to his feet, raising his heavy gauntlets in a defensive posture. His eyes were wide and feral.

  "Who's there?!" the Warden screamed, his voice booming in the stairwell. "Stay back! I'll break you! I can't stop it, I'll break you!"

  "Easy," Elias said, his voice soft, keeping the lighter held high so his face was visible. He began to slowly walk down the stairs, making sure his hands were relaxed. "I'm not here to fight."

  "You're an intruder!" the Warden shouted, his programming fighting against his panicked consciousness. He looked at Elias’s bloody clothes. "You're... you did this! You turned the quiet off!"

  "I woke you up," Elias corrected gently, taking another step down.

  "Put it back!" The giant man fell to his knees again, clutching his head with his mechanical claws, careful not to crush his own skull. "It's too loud! I remember... I remember what I did to the people in the lobby. I crushed them! They were just standing there, and the Consultant told me to clear the room, and I..."

  The Warden began to hyperventilate. The panic attack was massive, threatening to overload his augmented heart.

  Elias reached the landing. He stood ten feet away from the human tank. Elias didn't raise his weapon. He slowly lowered himself, sitting down on the stairs so he wasn't towering over the kneeling giant.

  "What's your name?" Elias asked quietly.

  The Warden blinked, tears cutting tracks through the grime on his face. "Designation... Unit 4."

  "No," Elias said firmly. "That's what he called you. What did your mother call you?"

  The giant man let out a broken, shuddering gasp. The memory fought through the thick fog of the neural block’s residue. "Thomas," he whispered. "My name is Thomas."

  "Hello, Thomas," Elias said, tossing his rusted wrench onto the floor. It clanged loudly, sliding away. Elias was completely unarmed. "My name is Elias. It hurts right now, doesn't it?"

  Thomas nodded, openly sobbing now. "It hurts everywhere. Inside."

  "I know," Elias said, gesturing to his own bloody side. "But it means you're alive. You aren't a machine, Thomas. You never were. And you don't have to hurt anyone ever again."

  Thomas looked at Elias, then at his mechanical hands. The feral panic slowly began to drain from his eyes, replaced by a profound, crushing grief. But he wasn't going to attack.

  Elias stood up slowly, wincing. He pointed up the stairs. "There's a man up there on Floor 45. He's very confused, and he needs help walking. Will you help me carry him down, Thomas?"

  The giant Warden sniffed, wiping his nose with the back of his heavy metal wrist. He looked at Elias, confusion warring with a desperate need for direction. "Carry him?"

  "Yeah," Elias smiled, a bloody, exhausted smile. "We've got a lot of stairs left. And we all have to carry each other now."

  The real victory.

  have to be monsters. They just need someone to show them grace.

  The Growth: Elias started this book hitting things with a wrench. Now, he's disarming a cybernetic super-soldier with pure empathy.

  Next Chapter: The Ground Floor. We finally reach the lobby. And we see what is waiting for them outside the Tower doors.