After we'd rested and done as much first aid on Boomeron as we could, we decided to head straight on up the access ladder to the ceiling scaffolds to try and get through to the residential level. It took a long time to get everyone up the ladder. Quold looked up some health and safety regulations and made a complicated rope harness, but didn't do it quite right so he bruised his ribs a lot because he kept falling off the ladder. Still, at least he had tied himself on so he didn't fall all the way down! STD-01's winch had broken earlier on so he had a lot of trouble getting up. Eventually we managed to get him up using Chaz's grapple gun and some ropes, but it was pretty hard work!
The room at the top was pretty much the same as the one at the bottom, with unpowered consoles and some cleaning supplies. We refilled Chaz's sprayer with some of my special blood-removing bleach mixture and I made some more food. Came out OK, but I thought I was getting better at cooking damnit! We managed to find some janitor's uniforms and I found one with a keycard in it. Boomeron found a porn calendar and Quold found a list of pending repair works. Quold managed to get a rough map of the work locations using his data slate. A lot of the repairs were in this one particularly large mansion.
After we'd rested we headed out onto the next level. It was mostly green parklands, trees and stuff, but not like the stuff we'd seen in the agricultural areas before. We headed to the nearest elevator shaft to see if we could get to the top more quickly. The elevators were dead, we checked the shafts and they were empty too. There were a couple more elevator shafts so we checked those, and the last one had a small red light on its control panel. I got STD-01 to try and access it, but he said it was only operable by some kind of ID implant. We were thinking about trying to find some bodies that might have the right chips in, when we spotted a floating version of the security bot that we took STD's tracks from. Chaz and I shouted to warn everyone, but of course that meant the bot spotted us.
The bot started heading towards us and its eyes were glowing red, which Quold says usually means they're in attack mode. We all ran back to the maintenance room, and everyone got there about the same time as Quold. We weren't sure if he'd been captured or killed by the bot but eventually we heard it shout at him to freeze just as he leapt through the door. Chaz put on one of the janitorial uniforms, and Quold said we should pretend we were from decontamination for Job number 129339. Chaz wanted to pass as she was in a janitorial uniform but I found it so I was gonna keep it, but then I figured she was the one in a janitor's uniform so I should give it to her. I tried to find it, but she somehow already had it.
The robot cut through the door and said it was going to sterilize us, but Q and C managed to stop it from doing that straight away. Eventually they blagged that we were a decontamination crew for this work order Q had found and it told us to go about our business. Q tried to get it to guard us, but it said it was currently under an insurgency protocol and had insurgents to contain. I told us we should stay away from a particular apartment block as that was where it was confining the insurgents. As it flew off I could see a weird shimmer in the air around it out of the corner of my eye. I had no idea what it was, but Boomeron seemed to think it was some kind of force field.
We decided to head to the mansion complex as the fancy guys who live round there would have pretty high clearance, and we might be able to operate the locked-out elevator. It was also on the opposite side from the building the robot told us to avoid, which seemed like a good plan. Quold checked the floor plan and it turned out to be the head of military logistics' mansion. We thought we should check on the situation outside whilst there were windows nearby. There were thousands of zombies swarming around the base of the tower and Boomeron and Chaz managed to spot quite a few special zombies.
We got to the front gate of the mansion and Quold told the house computer our work order numbers. It told us to go round to the tradesman's entrance and started listing faults. IT was particularly concerned about restoring its power feeds from the levels below, but Quold managed to convince it that wasn't our department, resulting in a much smaller list of faults to fix. We headed around the side of the house and it was pretty dark, but we managed to find the entrance. An android butler greeted us and started questioning us on how long it had taken us to arrive. Quold tried to convince it that it wasn't our fault, then tried to find it a complaint form but couldn't. It wasn't very impressed and I think it tore a few strips off him, though I couldn't really understand what it was saying. Eventually it stopped talking to him and started giving him the list of jobs and some map locations for within the house.
Around this time Q started talking about how the butler hadn't been corrupted by the red computer and was still functioning pretty much as normal. It was leading us to the first job, when suddenly it stopped and turned around and wandered off. Quold said to go after as it, something about a protocol being accepted, and then said he thought there might be an uncorrupted node nearby. The butler led us down to a basement level, below what had been the ground-level outside. Quold had been pretty smug about the whole thing, but then we got to the basement room and he fell to his knees screaming and bleeding from his eye sockets. Fortunately it stopped pretty quickly, and he seemed mostly OK. It seemed the AI got into his mind somehow as it knew a lot about us but fortunately it didn't seem to have been corrupted or to have taken exception to any of our previous decisions. It said it would let us have some use of its armouries and biogenic labs, and the robot butler brought us some really fancy food.
It said we should all go into the biogenic lab, and when I came out I felt awesome! Faster and stronger than ever before!
No comments:
Post a Comment