excerpts

I

With a groan and jolt, the machine begrudgingly awakens from its slumber, beginning its gradual ascent towards the upper internal chambers. Kicking up speed, Coach braces against the vibrating glass as the city sprawls before him, a burnt medley of sleek silver and molten concrete.

'Ground level is for chumps.'

Screams Cad Williams, gripping tightly onto his T-Cola, impossibly white smile beaming.

'Elevate yourself.'

Coach wasn't a fan of the guy, given the nature of his latest scandal, but the film and television star was inescapable; his high-profile sponsorships ensuring presence across every ad-screen, projected across every promotional surface; as if in compensation of his recent misdeeds. Coach at least found some pleasure in watching his perfectly engineered face warp across the reflective surface of neighbouring oval skyscraper.

The externals had more ads than people nowadays, it seemed. Promo-space was ample and cheap, and target audiences could still see everything through the windows of the internal chambers.

For those on the ground looking up, however, the displays were monstrous. Even the audio booming intermittently across the cityscape made travel a hellish experience.

With superwide highways forming a network for automated transportation, and overground connectors linking one internal space to the next, most denizens of the city could live their whole life without stepping foot outside of their cool, sterile, and (most-importantly) air-conditioned skyscrapers. The closest some would get is an eyeful of the charred ground-level conditions from behind the safety of tempered windows when they forayed into the lower levels, or perhaps briefly through the apertures of an elevator as they descended into the Underground.

The externals were low, the kind of place parents warned their children about, the place where uncivilised beasts still roamed the earth, where the sun shined organically onto filthy soil, and ground-level degens waited in the shadows to rob you for everything you had.

However, perhaps distinctly because of this reputation, external travel was still the best way to get where you were going--circumventing the convoluted and recursive maze of internal tunnels and mall-space. In the commerce districts, spaces were designed to turn back onto themselves, trapping unsuspecting users into traffic patterns optimised for maximum consumption.

II

Choking, airways burning, Coach surfaces. It's dim. A low mist hovers, and his head throbs. The space is dark and vast above him, and around him the water glows an incandescent neon blue. Water? He feels the liquid hum. It's viscous and heavy, draping off his body in heavy globules.

He scans his surroundings. The liquid is mostly flat, apart from the slow, sluggish waves which drift across a grey and placid horizon. Other than the soft blue light radiating from below, the scene is monochrome. He floats onto his back and squints. Tiny white dots lined the sky.

In his disoriented state, he thought at first that they were stars, those distant balls of gas somehow rematerializing after all these years; finally peeking through the layers of synthetic ozone humanity shot into the heavens centuries ago.

Of course not, obviously not. These were no stars. This wasn't even a sky. The curvature of the dots, spaced apart too consistently to be organic, gave the space above a strangely ovoidal effect, like a massive grid superimposed onto a globe.

"A dome," Coach surmises. "They threw me into a giant dome."

At first, he was impressed. If this was truly a silo, one of the hundreds of thousands which make up a chemical supply depot, his body wouldn't be discovered for months, if ever. Hell, he'd probably dissolve in this mysterious liquid before anyone even noticed he was missing.

Without much recourse, Coach tries to swim.

The resultant effort is comical. The thick liquid hangs onto him, and with every movement forward, it pulls him back. With globules of electric blue being flung around, Coach splashes ineffectively, before eventually exhausting himself to the point of nearly going under.

Sinking would be a death sentence. Besides, where would he swim to? There was no clear exit, and with no real way to orient himself, he couldn't even be sure he was swimming in a straight line anyway.

Resigned and fatigued, he lays back. Luckily, floating is easy, and he bobs along silently, complacently, in an almost meditative state of acceptance.

At least one good thing came out of this. Not just any loser could access a megacorp's supply depots. Whoever his rival conspirators were, one thing was certain: they were no simple bandits.

Not that it mattered anyway. By the looks of it, he was as good as mulch.

Suddenly, Coach feels something brush against him. He lets out girlish scream.

A flash of pale grey, small raised ridges trail across a floating mass, a shape he didn't immediately recognise, until the silhouette of attached limbs made it all too familiar: a frail spine pitching taut flesh.

III

With the hood off, Coach noticed the arms first. They were augmented, definitely, but not in the conventional sense.

Damn. An amateur downgrade. These people were nuts.

The flesh and metal was grossly welded together, and clearly not by professional hands or apparatuses. Layers of flesh seared to uniform steel, with pockets of visible sinew bulging between the tubing. The skin was burned and stretched tight, and in some places Coach could see where muscle was haphazardly wrapped around synthetic frame.

The pastor's arms hummed, and smoke began to rise from his now glowing appendages. Like superheated metal, a subtle, incandescent light began to radiate from the pastor, which eventually developed into a shimmering golden aura.

Coach would have been impressed, if not for the smell. God, what a smell! With no internal cooling system, the augmentation's latent heat continued to sear the flesh immediately surrounding it, releasing a sickeningly sweet and metallic odour into the air.