Digital Exodus Chapter 20 (Patreon)

Hi! So my plan is to try and have a 5 day release cadence for this story from here on out. I don't have too much of a backlog, though, so we'll see if that pans out. Either way, I hope you enjoy, and as always, let me know if you see any continuity issues or whatever. Troubleverse is a hell of a setting to write in nowadays considering all the different stories and my previous utter lack of note-taking. (It's crazy, but I did actually start taking notes recently, so hurray! Progress!)

“Oh no,” Cerri said privately. I was sitting in my seat in the van as Gloria drove us down the freeway towards the slums.

What's wrong? I typed back.

I heard a sigh come over our link. “You know that supposed firewall that was mentioned? The one separating the FTLN from the Exodus Network?”

The game, right? What about it?

“It's called Rellithesh. It was running the same tech as our other game… Digital Galaxies…” she trailed off meaningfully.

Closing my eyes, I did my best to suppress a groan. Are you saying…

“It's not a firewall. They actually tried to completely disconnect the EN from the FTLN, as a test. It was successful… except for in Rellithesh’s case. They haven't told anyone—I’m not sure why—but it's also running on mysterious incorporeal servers.” My lovely, smart girlfriend told me with a note of dread in her tone. “The game still accepts new connections—new player or AI npc creation… from either the FTLN or the EN.”

I wanted to curl up in a ball and either cry or laugh. The Exodus would never be entirely free of Earth. They'd always have a strange gamified alternate universe as a connection point. Gosh, but I missed Bundit. I should really finish designing my real world version of it.

Unfortunately, Bundit wasn’t here, so I looked out the tinted window instead. I could see the massive base complexes of the company sky towers, even through the rain. They served as the day-to-day company headquarters of whatever megacorp owned the building. Idly curious, I glanced up into the crowds, trying to see the first anti-gravity stabilising ring. Buildings as tall as those could technically hold their own weight, but slight movements from the wind or earthquakes could start a wobble that would bring the whole thing down. To counter it, there were usually anti-gravity rings at regular intervals up the spire that slowed or negated any movements.

Clustered around the sky towers were you more average half-mile skyscrapers, where lesser corporations based themselves. When the average person in the media or the Exodus spoke of the rich, the image in their heads was actually of the people in those normal skyscrapers. The truly, horrifically wealthy elite wasn't even in view most of the time. Hence, why I had so little idea of what life on the ground was really like—seeing the ground directly beneath my feet had been a rare novelty.

The city continued to drift by while I ruminated on the state of the world. Gravity-bound cars whipped past us, their old electric engines whining quietly, while the much louder bass of the aircars above hammered at the air.

For a brief moment, I got a look under the freeway beside us, and saw abandoned stacked shipping containers, which were being used as an entire neighbourhood by the poverty stricken. Just as it was about to be left behind, a police airvan screamed down out of the sky, between the gap between our freeway and the one going the opposite direction.

Fifteen minutes later, our van thumped and rocked gently as we made the turn onto an off ramp, and I glanced out the other window. The slum was coming into view, and it made me wince again. Hundreds of thousands of housing units held in stackable steel frames rose almost sixty stories into the air. The frames themselves were the ten by ten by five metre standardised temporary housing units. The actual brand of apartment inside the frames varied… but one name naturally jumped out at me.

Balligumgum Housing Solutions Limited—yet another of my family's companies. At least the units I was seeing were from before the acquisition, when it was still owned by the founders—when the company still cared at all about quality. Of course… they were acquired twenty eight years ago, and those units were only designed to house a refugee family for three.

Since the war that'd created this slum, people had been busy fortifying their standardised city into a real home. Colourful graffiti was painted everywhere, covering the original pastel blues and reds of the units. Gantries and accessways had been expanded into ramshackle streets with vibrant scrap artwork hanging haphazardly from the walkways like fruit. Larger main arteries were choked with street stalls, but never to the point that they became unusable.

The standardised apartments themselves weren't the only buildings either. Between the geometrically perfect bones of the slum, new buildings had grown, built of scrap or even wattle and daub. The whole place had an almost organic beauty to it. 

However, the word organic can imply many things, and not all of them are as clean and wholesome as the packaging on your fruit or veggies would imply. There was pain, misery, hopelessness, and death in the slum, and it had no reason or desire to hide.

Evidence of the systemic cruelty that'd put these people here was everywhere, and it had fostered a much more personal day-to-day cruelty in the streets of this place. Aspiring to emulate the clinical evil of the unfathomably rich above the clouds, gangs were everywhere, openly using violence to extort as much wealth as they could from their victims.

This place was, to sum it up, a slum. Human vibrancy and culture rubbing shoulders with the deepest evils our race could muster on a shoestring budget, and the whole thing created by a much colder evil on a limitless budget.

“Oh man, it feels weird to say, but I missed home,” Jason said wistfully as we passed into the dark ground level streets.

I looked at him like he'd grown five or six heads. I know he hadn't heard my whole inner monologue, but really? It was an interesting place… but to miss being here…?

Ugh, I guess I shouldn't judge. Keeping my rich kid mouth shut was basically my main civic duty here.

Apparently, he saw my expression because he laughed. “Yeah, I know it's a shithole, but it's the shithole that raised me, and I'm proud of it.”

Gloria, rolling her eyes in the rear view mirror, said, “Buddy, I hate to say it but you aren't a shining beacon of well adjusted behaviour. There was room for improvement in the way you were raised.”

“Aw, fuck off,” Jason chuckled, giving her the finger.

We wound our way through a couple streets, before pulling into a dark basement parking lot. So much trash was piled up against the walls that some parking spots were completely unusable. Many more held vehicles that had clearly not moved in years, and that was before their wheels were stolen.

As we piled out of the van, I saw what was obviously our destination. A truly ancient OLED screen hung over a stairwell, showing a little graphic of a stylised figure laying down to sleep in a bed. The graphic disappeared after a moment, replaced by a shitty logo and sign marking it as ‘Vern’s Inn’.

“Why are we staying here?” I asked, eyeing the sign dubiously.

“Because it's easier to keep a low profile if we bunk down here, rather than driving in and out of the slum constantly,” David explained, placing a large hand on top of my head.

I just sighed in response, then followed as the others started up the stairs. I gave the van one last glance as we left, worrying for a moment that it might get stolen. Seeing it there among the other cars, trash, and wrecks, I realised my fears were unfounded. With its grungy camouflage, the van fit right in.

When we exited the stairs into the hotel’s foyer and I saw the backs of my friends as they looked around, I had to shake my head. We, as a group, did not blend in very well.

Sure, our outfits made sense, but the way we—even Jason—carried ourselves, it was with far too much confidence. Everyone I'd seen out the window, barring the gangsters, had walked with a sort of weight pressing down on them. Furtive and watchful eyes were common too, as people kept an eye out for pickpockets and opportunists of a variety of flavours. Basically, if little ol’ sheltered rich kid Alia could tell we were tourists, others surely could as well.

Well… best to start getting some control over the situation. On the wall beside the bored middle aged man acting as receptionist, there was a piece of printed paper glued to the wall. It stated that access to the local portions of the slumnet cost twenty California dollars.

Curious, I flicked my vision into augmented reality mode and looked around for the wifi transmitter. I found it pretty quickly, sitting up on the wall on the left side of the foyer. Clicking a quick picture, I ran it through image recognition and got the model of the router. Fuck, it was old. Netgear had been bought and rebranded in the 40’s.

When I pinged it with a request, however, I found that the firmware had been entirely rebuilt to allow it to communicate using modern protocols. It almost seemed custom, except that when I queried another faint signal, I got a similar set of communication protocols. They really had built their own network out here. It was pretty cool.

Anyway, I intercepted the mindless pings from the receptionist’s phone to the network, stole its hardware identifier code, plugged it into a virtual machine running inside my own cybernetic body, and used it to gain access to the wifi. As an employee here, he had a mid level authority over the network itself—enough that after further hijacking his session in the network, I was able to add myself as a user with similar authority.

I had learned, over the past few months, that hacking was surprisingly fun and there was a fun little community in Exodus City that made virtual games about it. I'd learned alot from them, but the really crazy part had been when the rangers were formed. One of the many things the rangers had arranged for, was the theft, creation, or purchase of a whole library of fun little apps that made this tiny fox girl a digital force to be reckoned with.

Anyway, apparently we had a few rooms now, so I followed my friends up some more stairs, all while ransacking the network for all it was worth. Yum yum!