[UNKN█WN]
The City is an evergrowing expanse of machinery and procedurally generated structures. But it wasn't always this way. The City, its name long forgotten to time, is a manmade structure. Created and once managed by humans. They created it as a safe haven in the brutal vacuum of space.
Why nobody knows. How, are an even bigger mystery and the answer to the question when nobody remembers. Many, many generations have come and gone in the time it took for Pathos to awaken from his slumber. In those millennia, the human race slowly lost what was then a common genetic mutation that they used to access their own technology. The NetSphere, they named it. A virtual paradise for them to relish.
Unfortunately, human minds haven't changed much over the years and inequality prevailed. The difference between the rich and the poor grew bigger until only the rich could gain access to this system. The poor had no choice but to resort to violent schemes for their own share of paradise. How the contagion, the sickness that progressively started to delete the Net Terminal Gene from human bodies came to be is unknown.
Pathos trudged through the uneven and cramped metal hallway, having long since left the facility that he has awakened in. His state of attire was the same black armour with glowing purple lines. His hair lightly blew back and forth with his walking speed.
He had been walking... for a while. 2,112,562 hours to be precise. He had no need for sustenance. No need for sleep or rest. He had but one thing he didn't want to go without, and that was a company. He wanted to talk to someone so badly. But all that he came across were rotting corpses. He would occasionally find a strange, highly advanced tower with a multitude of blue-coloured cameras on almost every part of its body. These towers were placed haphazardly across various terrain, some were upside down, and some were built into the walls. Yet... none triggered when his presence passed by them. A quick remote reprogramming took sure of that.
Pathos couldn't extract any information from these towers, as they had but one function, that being to detect human beings and alert some manner of a higher authority, which Pathos had no access to, and bring worth a plethora of these aptly named "Safeguards", whatever they were. So Pathos simply removed their "sight" from their programming, essentially making them giant machine towers that don't do anything, since their starting sequence is locked down, the secondary sequence, the Safeguard spawn, is inaccessible.
Rudimentary, simple yet effective solution to a technology that seemed hardly out of its infancy in Pathos' eyes. The structure of the environment changed constantly yet managed to maintain a strange, chaotic pattern. The rooms, levels and so on seemed to be built repeatedly through an algorithm. However, they lacked any sort of... "life" in them. Not even rodents or alike could be seen for miles upon miles.
"What a depressing world..."
The male's deep voice almost echoed throughout the empty corridors of a building that was half-destroyed, and half-pristine. There was nothing for him to see, nothing for him to use and no one for him to talk to. Truly, Pathos was alone, as he was for so, so long in that damn laboratory...
Over the hours, days, months and years, Pathos grew tired of the loneliness. The unchanging yet constantly different scenery of broken machinery. He was sick of being alone, tired of not being able to do anything but aimlessly wander through the seemingly infinite city. Not even these Safeguards paid him any visit... Looking up and past the metallic ceiling, thousands of different floors unveiled themselves to Pathos. Each is different, yet fundamentally indifferent to the one before it. Strange symbols appeared in his blue and purple eyes, flashing far too quickly for someone to catch a glimpse of what they looked like.
►DIVERTING_POWER...
►Direction_Range_Distance_SYSTEM: 9000%
►DRADIS_CONTACTS: 175 227 987 142
Billions of small and large red objects appear in his vision. Some humanoid, others not. Some were small and could fit into his palm, others were massive and towered over him by hundreds of meters. These were all the intelligent forms of life his DRADIS could detect, its range being that of 1 billion kilometres in all directions. It could detect radiological signatures, gravity cavitations and so on. It was like radar, but a trillion times better. It painted an almost clear picture of what the people and other lifeforms looked like. Some were alone, some were in small groups, and others appeared to be situated in small to medium cities.
Yet, there were these strange areas in-between the levels of the massive megastructure that were devoid of anything. Anything, except countless watchtowers similar if not the same to the ones Pathos had come across before.
In fact, one of these "dead zones" was just above him, two kilometres above him actually but that's close enough, considering there was a massive and thick layer of an extremely durable foreign metal in the way.
►REPULSION_THRUSTERS: ON
Small, purple cylinder-shaped protrusions appeared from within Pathos' back, they resembled barrels of small jet engines if anything. They appeared to be emitting some kind of purplish-blue light that flared up for a moment...
-BOOM-
Pathos rocketed from the ground, flying upwards at a few times the speed of sound, the sudden acceleration and kinetic force created a smooth, perfectly shaped crater in the cold metallic floor beneath.
-ZOOM-
He stopped just a hair's width away from the ceiling, nearly railing into it head-first. His expression remained stoic as his eyes flashed in colour and thousands of lines of text appeared in his vision, visible only to him and him alone. It was a detailed prognosis of the material the ceiling was made out of... but most of these materials were foreign to the male's database.
►MEGASTRUCTURE_INFRASTRUCTURE_HARDNESS...
►9.5/10
The rating was worrying at best, but Pathos appeared to not be deterred by his diagnosis. He placed one of his palms against the surface, feeling the cold metal even through his glove-covered hand. Then, a myriad of undecipherable symbols flashed in his eyes.
►DIVERTING_POWER...
►WEAPONS_SYSTEMS: 9000%
Pathos' power grid worked differently from what humans were used to. 100% should be the absolute maximum, but for Pathos, 100% is the default setting of one of his systems. In essence, 100% is the baseline for all of his systems, not the maximum. 90% would be below average, and 110% would be slightly above average. He can safely divert power from his Anti-Matter core to any of his systems to boost its proficiency by up to 9000%.
►WEAPON_CONSTRUCT_INITIALIZED...
►GRAVITATIONAL_BEAM_EMITTER
►ENERGY_CAVITATION: 9000%
Pathos' forearm reshaped itself, almost like it was made out of clay. Quickly, it took the shape of a rectangular gun with four lines running down its barrel across its four walls. Lightning crackled across the weapon's surface, originating from the barrel where crimson light slowly appeared. The gun, as if opening itself, widened. The sides of the gun expanded to the sides, widening the calibre of the rifle to a fist-sized hole. The crimson light intensified and began rapidly flashing...
"Gravitational Beam Emitter firing in..."
"...3..."
"...2..."
"...1..."
"Fire."
Then... bright red light covered one of the lower levels of The City...
-BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAM-
An eardrum-breaking bang was followed by the howling of the nonexistent wind. The very fabric of space and time screeched in agony as they were warped around the bright crimson beam that was fired from Pathos' gun arm. Space distorted, time itself ceased to be around the beam as it easily pushed matter aside. The seemingly indestructible ceiling of the stratum melted to the sides, allowing the red beam easy passage into another thick plating of the material. That... met the same fate as the first. Two... Three... Nine... Fifty... A hundred... Two thousand... and finally... the beam excited through the uppermost ceiling of The City, harmlessly shooting off into the vacuum of space. It left behind a wake of destruction, the hole it created was 2 kilometres wide, and the overall distance it borrowed through was roughly around 2 billion squared kilometres. Usually, blasts of Gravitational Beam Emitters are followed by explosions as the matter they pushed aside comes flowing back. However, this time... there was no matter to come back.
Pathos cleaved a large hole through the entire city, leaving nothing behind to explode in the wake of his weapon. The thrusters on his back kept him from flying backwards at many times the speed of sound, the recoil of a GBE is nothing but as spectacular as its destructive potential.
"...Oops."
Stoic, but still slightly astonished. That was Pathos' tone, he was surprised by his own destructive power... or perhaps he merely overestimated the might of the infrastructure of The City he found himself in. He couldn't reverse time though and gave a silent prayer to those unfortunate enough to be caught in the blast. His systems needed recalibrating as that was supposed to be a blast capable of blasting through the ceiling of the level, and only the ceiling.
What was done was done, and Pathos didn't want to wait any longer. He slowly flew through the ceiling layer, coming out a few minutes later. He quickly found himself in between The City's strata, perhaps the most dangerous place in the whole megastructure. Looking around, he was met with a smooth but deserted plain that stretched on seemingly forever. The only protrusions were the watchtowers on the ground and the ceiling. Pathos regarded them with a disinterested look as the "eyes" on the advanced towers flashed from blue to red, and lightning bolts were fired from the pointy constructs on their heads.
Thousands of lightning strikes struck the ground and the ceiling, leaving behind a brief gale of wind, strange material and a brief spatial distortion. When the small tornado cleared, humanoid robots emerged. White in colour and crawling on all fours with red eyes and cross-shaped symbols on their foreheads. Their design was eerie and creepy. But Pathos appeared unbothered by them.
"...So these are the Safeguards?"
Pathos' eyes flashed strange symbols again, this time, only two appeared in his pupils.
∪ -> ✖
Tens of thousands of Safeguards quickly crawled across the ground, covering the once black floor in white. Pathos appeared disinterested in them as quickly as the symbols in his eyes disappeared.
"You don't have it..."
►GRAVITY_CAVITATIONS_INITIATED...
►SPATIAL_ANOMALY_ESTABLISHED
►SINGULARITY_REACTOR_SPOOLING...
►FTL_STANDY
As the Safeguards quickly neared Pathos, his arms segmented themselves near his elbows. His arms forearms were no longer connected to his upper arms, but they still managed to float together as if connected via an invisible string. The same could be said of his legs as they to divided near his knees, spheres forming between the four segmented limbs.
⊚ -> ⊙ -> ⊕
Pathos' eyes flashed again, showing symbols nobody could understand but himself. The spheres in between his disconnected limbs turned into hollow circles, spinning at high speeds and emitting a whirring sound.
►DISTANCE: Calculating...
►44 984 144 km²
"Farewell..."
-BOOOM-
Then, a flash of light quickly overcame Pathos' body, and he vanished in an extremely loud BOOM followed by an incredibly powerful shockwave that blew all of the Safeguards back thousands of kilometres as well as deformed the layers of extremely durable metal between levels.
-BOOM-
Two hundred levels above, Pathos appeared in the very similar fashion he left. But he didn't appear in-between levels. Rather, he appeared in a cavernous series of buildings. Buildings that were quickly blown apart by the shockwave that followed after his exit from the faster-than-light boom.
He looked around, floating in the air before flying down towards one of the stable buildings in the distance. His repulsion thrusters disappeared into his back, almost as if they were never there to begin with.
"Log... 034. Current location... UNKNOWN, 200 levels above the previous location. Current time... 2,112,569. Current objective... find human life. Secondary objective: ██████."
...
...
...
"This is Pathos, setting off."
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//If you see the time in Pathos' being later than the time reported in the chapter itself, its because time actually passes in-between these moments.//