Maiyuki: Chapter 2 At the Sunken City

Beautiful Snow
[Maiyuki]

By David John Reichen

Chapter Two - AT THE SUNKEN CITY

“Wow”, exclaims Jorge Xaves, sitting at the habitat's main control console watching the local news as he is enabling the computers between here and the sub that we are using to communicate between each other.

“Nane? What?” asks Hiro Sieme, looking up from where he and I, Lief Chancey, are doing our pre-dive checkout of the suits that we will be using for our dive down to the old city of Detroit, Oregon.

“All of those abandoned cars, right?” asks Chris Johnson, the pilot of the sub, who is doing the same things as Jorge but from the sub's end.

“Not that again,” I say, adding a small pray to Buddha to bring a little more enlightenment into the world. “Didn't they already do something like that a week ago, during the weather report?”

Jorge says, “yeah, but this time, it's because no one has turned up to claim the cars yet.”

“They'll probably find them eventually,” I say and turn my attention to finishing Hiro's suit, while he is doing the same for mine. “Hiro, I'm done with your suit, everything checks out OK. Are you done with mine?”

“Yes. What's with all these extra wirepads in the helmet though?”

“They're interfaces for the implants that I have embedded in my skull,” I answer, while pointing at the top of my head. “With them, I can see and hear things,” I add, in a chuckling voice.

Hiro looks at me worriedly. Perhaps he is thinking that I am a bit insane.

“Here, check this out,” I say. I put my suit's helmet on and make a couple of hand gestures while saying, “mind transference jutsu.” I give him the finger, six times over. The hands of both suits and my own two have one finger extended.

Jorge joins us and says, “ hey, nice trick. Can you do a fireball too?”

I shake my head and say, “No, but I can do a pretty good Jidori”

Hiro just smirks, knowing what show we are referring to that is still popular where he comes from.

I take off the helmet, put it back and ask Jorge and Chris if they are done syncing up the computers. They are, so we wheel out the suits to the waiting sub. Jorge opens up the double doors of the habitat's airlock, that way we don't have to wait for the air lock to cycle through and follows behind us.

Hiro and I take the suits over to where they get mounted onto the sub. The suits we are using are special prototypes of the ones that will be used on the Mars Expedition. We are testing them here since we can't afford to use NASA's underwater training facility. The sub is on loan from NOAA and the Habitat was choppered in by military helicopter. A typical shoe string operation.

As Jorge boards the sub, to join Chris at the co-pilots seat, Hiro and I mount our suits to the sub, so that we can use them when we reach the lake's bottom. We climb into the suits by opening up the chest panel, turn our backs to the suit we are using, step backwards onto the ledges that are at the bottoms of the chest cavity. Once we are standing on the suits, we slip our legs down the leggings of the suit, hook up the main suit to our inner suit, that we have been wearing since we got up this morning, put our arms through the sleeves of the suits and close the chest panels. Once the suits have cycled from standby mode to active mode, we put on our helmets. We are now enclosed in our temporary wombs that are ready to take care of our needs for as long as forty eight hours.


We descend down through the murky depths of Detroit Lake, towards the waiting city, far below the surface. Ever downward we go, the sub's lights and Hiro and my helmet lights shooting beams of light across the opaque water, not being reached by the sun's dim winter glow. As we come near the lakes bottom, our lights pick out shapes, shapes that we are not expecting to find.

“HOLY CRAP!!!” screams Hiro, “what are they?”

I wince at his outburst, wishing that the automatic volume control of the suit's radio was a bit more automatic.

“Do those look like bodies to you?” asks Jorge.

“They could be,” answers Chris, siting next to Jorge, at the sub's helm.

“I think so too,” I say, agreeing with them. “Since we are close to the bottom, why not unlatch us from the sub, so that we can take a closer look?”

“Sure think, Boss,” says Jorge. He decouples our suits from the sub, allowing us to sink down the rest of the way to the lake's bottom.

“Do you think it's safe?” mumbles Chris to himself, as we hit bottom.

I answer, half-jokingly, “why not? Unless they attack us, I see no reason to call off the dive. The way I figured it, we are the only ones here that are equipped to have a look around anyway.”

“Your kidding me?” asks Jorge.

“About what?”

“They might still be alive?”

“Don't know,” I answer, non committedly.

I walk over to where Hiro is standing. He hasn't said a word since we got here, I wonder how he is handling this. I gaze through his helmet's vizor and notice that his face is a lot more paler that it normally is. Could this be his first time seeing death?

“Heu, Hiro, genki desu?” I ask, in Japanese, hoping that my using his native language will snap him out of his fugue. His eyes move, ever so slowly, to focus on where I am standing. At least he has not gone catatonic on me. I hope he can keep it together long enough to finish the dive. Once again I try to get him out of his daze and say, “come on, Hiro, answer me!”

He nods his head and says, “yeah, I guess so. What are they doing here, at the bottom of the lake?”

“Don't know. Maybe they all decided to take one final swim,” I answer, whimsically.

“Jorge, Chris,” I say, switching my attention to the two in the sub. “Patch me into the NET and finger the local sheriff's office. Make it a full feed. I am sure that they would be interested in this.”

In the sub, Jorge calls up the chat program, which will act like a video phone between me and the NET. Meanwhile, Chris makes the necessary settings to patch the sub's communications system to the NET and fingers the sheriff's office, letting them know that we want to communicate with them over the NET.

Jorge says, “oh, man, is some serious merde we've found.”

“Yeah,” says Chris. “I wonder how many are down here anyway, why?”

“Same here Hombre.”

A very confused deputy peers at the screen in front of him, wondering why there is a red flashing box that has appeared with the word EMERGENCY flashing on it. “Strange,” he thinks to himself, “this is the first time the Emergency Port Server has been triggered besides the monthly testing, I wonder what is going on.” He hovers the mouse over the blinking window, opens it and says, in a confused voice, “Who are you? Why are you using the Emergency Port Server, instead of 911? Do you have an emergency?”

“Hello, I'm Jorge Xaves,” introduces Jorge.

“Chris Johnson here,” says Chris, leaning into the camera's view.

“I didn't know that the chat program we are using would connect to the EPServer, sorry about that,” says Jorge, “I guess it was the only program able to take a full NET feed from us.”

“That should teach us not to bypass 911,” mumbles Chris.

“Ah, huh,” affirms Jorge, “to answer the rest of your questions, I think we should patch you through to our boss and let him explain why we are calling you.”

“Boy, he doesn't look to pleased, does he?” comments Chris, as Jorge completes the connections needed between me and the sheriff's office.

Jorge says, “No shit!”

My suit signals that I have a connection between me and the sheriff's office, via the NET. “Hi,” I say, “I'm Lief Chancey and I may have found the missing people you have been looking for. Oh, I'm sending you my Digital ID, it should make clear why I am using the EPServer.”

"OK," says the deputy, who answered our connection. He shrugs his shoulders, as if wondering what all the fuss is with me wanting him to enter my Digital ID. When he enters my D ID, things happen to the image of me that is displayed on his screen. When he first connected to me, he was looking at me sitting at my desk at Boston Technical University, in Boston, Oregon, not the the other Boston, where I have an office as an associate researcher, I get to use their facilities without having to teach any classes; as soon as he entered the D ID however, the image changed to my other job, me dressed in my United Nations Enforcers uniform (we wear black not blue unlike the Peacekeepers do) at my cubical in the United Nation Headquarters, Geneva, Switzerland. "What the???" says the deputy at the unexpected change in the appearance of my avatar and its location. He leans over to his fellow deputy and whispers, "hey, check this out. This guy's got a level 13 D ID and he's MIL."

"A 13? I didn't know it went that high?" she asks, wondering if this is another one of those newbie pranks he has been trying to pull since she started. She bends over to see her fellow deputy's console and looks at me on the screen. I smile, menacingly, and wave at her. I then point downward, to where my D ID and security level is displayed. When she notices that her partner wasn't playing a joke on her, she swivels around in her chair and calls out, "SHERIFF, get your ass in here STAT. We have a 13MIL on the EP Server."

The Sheriff appears on my video feed and says, sort of out of breath from running to where the two deputies are sitting, "what can we do for you?"

"It's more like what we can do for you," I reply.

"Why's that?" he asks, kind of confusedly.

"My team and I are conducting tests on the Mars Suits at Detroit Lake. We are currently at the old city that is at the bottom of the lake."


"HOLD IT!" the sheriff interrupts, " it looks to me like you are in an office somewhere. How can you claim to be in a lake?"

I sigh and wonder why it takes so long for some people to get used to all of this new tech, and say "I am using an avatar program right now, a computer simulation, I'm actually at the bottom of the lake.”

"Chris, give me control of the sub's starboard remote camera"

"You've got it," says Chris, as he switches the control of the requested camera to me.

I get the camera to point to me and change my video from the avatar to the camera's video. I then wave at the camera as best that my bulky suit allows and say, "here I am. See?"

"OK."

"To get back to what I was saying, this is what we found down here," I say. I pan the camera so that our onlookers can see what surrounds us and say, "I think these are the people that you are trying to get in touch with. I am going to take a closer look at one of them."

"Fine."

I leave Hiro, standing next to the sub, make my way closer to one of the bodies floating nearby and begin my examination of one of the unfortunates and say, “this one seems to be bloated, almost obese. I don't know if this is what it normally looked like when it was alive or if this is the result of gases trapped in the decomposing body.”

As I reach out to the one in front of me, I notice something strange, completely unexpected. I bend closer in, cupping my hands to shield out some of the light from the sub and turn off my headlight as well. “Guys, you might not believe this but,” I say, in an astonishing voice, “this one seems to be glowing slightly, perhaps from the bacteria that is causing the bloating.

“Jorge, Chris,” I call out to them,”can you do a sonar and thermal sweep of this area and the whole town. I would like to know just how many are down here and how they are distributed. Oh, and could you also turn off the external light for me, please.”

“OK,” says Jorge, “starting the sweeps now, they should be done in a couple of minutes.”

“Rodger,” says Chris, “cutting the requested lighting, now.”

With most of the lights off, the surrounding water plunges into darkness. The only light in this abyssal depths are from the sub's running lights and Hiro's headlamp.

The spectacle before us is eerie, almost overwhelming. Through the pitch blackness, the bodies of the people that everyone has been searching for glow, slowly bobbing around in the eddy currents at the bottom of the lake. They remind me of jellyfish that I had seen somewhere, floating in a tank, lit from the bottom.

As the results of the two scans that I requested are being displayed, I notice something unusual and say, “hey, that's odd.”

Chris asks, “what do you mean, ODD?”

“If you mean,” continues Jorge, “seeing a bunch of glow in the dark stiffs floating around at the bottom of the lake, yeah, that sure is odd.”

“Yes, but, that's not what I mean though,” I answer back, “all of them are close to the city. None seem to be anywhere else.”

“Now that you mention it,” says Chris, “we didn't find any of them until we got close to the city.”

Jorge says, in a haunted voice, while making the sign of the cross, “it's like some mass suicide ritual. They all come to the lake, manage to swim down to the city, just to die.”

I think to myself, “Suicide? Ritual? A gathering of a cult perhaps.” It dawns on me that I might know what's going on here and blurt out, “Unausgeschprichlichen Culten!!”

“HUH????” say both Chris and Jorge, quizzically.

“Oh, Unspeakable Cults,” I answer, “it's the title of a book I once read back home, for research purposes.”

“I believe that rumors of their demise,” I mumble to myself, “might be a bit exaggerated.”

Before any of them can ask what I meant by that or what type of research I do that would require my to read much less know about such an arcane and restricted book, a scream comes out over the intercom, halting anymore discussion.


“What was that?” asks Jorge.

Chris says, “someone screamed. Who though?”

“It's Hiro,” I answer back, wondering why he would be screaming like that. I check his suits telemetry to find out if he is still by the sub, like I told him. Unfortunately, he is not close by at all. While I was looking at the body, he had wandered to one of the nearby buildings. Some diving buddy I am for not noticing that he had decided to go for a stroll. “Why would he go over there anyway”, I think, as I rush over to him.

“Is he Okay?” asks Chris, while Jorge brings up the suit's monitors.

“According to the auto-doc, he's fine,” says Jorge, “If there was something wrong, an alarm would have gone off. Oh, Oh!”

“Oh, Oh, what?” says Chris.

“His brainwaves have betaed!”

“Huh?”

“It means that he's fainted,” I answer, as I peer at Hiro's face, through his suit helmet's vizor. “I officially call this dive over! Bring the sub over here. I'll clamp him onto the mount, we are going back to the dock.”

They bring the sub over to where Hiro and I are, I attach Hiro to the sub and then myself. We head up towards the surface of the lake at a rapid accent. Luckily these suit maintain a constant pressure, so we don't have to worry about the bends. To pass the time while waiting to surface, I access Hiro's suit's video feed, to find out what scared him so much.

I see the bottom of the lake. A layer of silt coats everything, the debris that has floated down over the long decades that the city has been flooded. It's strange that there isn't that much down here though, maybe the clean water act is actually doing some good. What I do see though is something that I did not notice when I was racing to Hiro, tracks in the silt. The tracks were like rows of paired segmented lines, snaking around. They remind me of tractor tread marks. How anyone could pull off a stunt like that escapes me.

The Vid follows Hiro as he moves along one of the tracks. He goes to one of the buildings, where tracks lead straight through a partially opened door. This might be what caught his attention, luring his from the sub's. I see him reach out to the door and open it. After a few moments of seeing him surveying the room he is in, I see what may have frightened him.


“Ack!” I exclaim. “Hey, Guys, will you take a look at this, it might be what spooked him.”

I send them a clip of the video, so that they can see it to. Two HUGE snapping claws thrust out menacingly. A loud scream can be heard, Hiro's. The door quickly closes, blocking out whatever the claws belonged to from sight.

“What the heck was that thing?” asks Chris.

Jorge answers, “It's an alien monster.”

“It looks like a giant crawfish to me,” I say. “It could explain why all of these bodies made it to the city though. Crawfish are scavengers. If there is more than one of them down there, they wouldn't have much problems moving them, close to where they live. They can then munch on the bodies when they get hungry.”

“Eew,” says Chris, “people as food.”

“Man, how can you come up with something like that?” asks Jorge.

“All that I meant is that we are all carrion in the end. We shouldn't expect nature to treat us as something special, like divine beings created by some unknowable deity.”

We reach the dock, take Hiro, who is still unconscious in his suit, into the habitat, take him out of his suit and place him on his bed. We leave leave him connected to the suit, the cable draping between him and the suit.

“So,” Chris asks, “what do we do now?”

Jorge adds, “do we try to wake him up?”

I say, “ just leave him hooked up to the suit. If he doesn't wake up by morning, we will call a doctor and find out what we should do. Right now, he is safe, the suit can take care of him until then. If something happens, the suit monitor will let us know.

“Right now, I have to deal with the spectators back at the sheriff's office.”

“Oh, yeah,” says Chris, “what happened to them?”

Jorge asks, “are they still online?”

“Yeah, I cut their input feed so that they wouldn't distract us while we were taking care of Hiro here,” I say, patting him on the shoulder. He moves around a bit, maybe he sensed my touch but he stays unconscious. “If you don't mind, I need to calm them down a bit. They don't seem happy being left out of the loop.

“I suggest that both of you get some sleep, who knows what we will be doing tomorrow. Bye.”

I leave them and walk to my cubicle, sit down on my bed and re-open the input stream from the sheriff's office. I tell them that since it is so late in the night, I will contact them in the morning to decide what is to be done with what we found at the bottom of the lake.