Story code: ST-001722
Part 4: Unauthorized Biomass
The steel door bowed inward with a catastrophic groan. The heavy iron deadbolt snapped, the sheer force of the impact sending sheared bolts pinging off the concrete walls like shrapnel. Vance kept his 9mm raised, his finger resting on the trigger, though his mind screamed at the futility of it. The hollow-point rounds hadn’t even scratched the asset’s plating outside. In this confined space, Vanguard-01 was going to tear him apart.
Above his head, a sudden shower of rust and ancient dust cascaded over the glowing terminal screen. Vance didn’t take his eyes off the buckling door, but a sharp metallic scrape drew his attention upward. The heavy iron grate covering the bunker’s ventilation shaft was kicked loose from the inside. It plummeted, smashing into the console desk with a deafening crash.
A grimy hand, wrapped in taped leather gloves, thrust out of the dark ductwork. A face framed by a battered, dual-filter respirator peered down at him.
“Don’t shoot, suit,” a muffled, frantic voice hissed through the mask. “It’s gonna flood the room with halon gas the second that door drops. Grab my hand.”
Vance stared. The thermal signature from the perimeter. The localized heat bloom moving through the old smelting floor an hour ago. It hadn’t been the massive, heavily plated AI. It had been a man. The actual scavenger. The company had trapped them both.
Another seismic impact rocked the bunker. The top hinge of the blast door shrieked and sheared cleanly off, spraying sparks across the floor.
Vance didn’t hesitate. He holstered the useless sidearm, stepped onto the rolling chair, and grabbed the outstretched hand. The scavenger hauled him upward with desperate, wiry strength. Vance scrambled into the cramped, freezing duct just as the main door finally gave way. It crashed inward, slamming against the concrete floor with a boom that shook the bunker’s foundation.
Vance twisted in the narrow metal space, looking down through the open grate. Vanguard-01 stepped into the ruined room. Up close, under the flickering emergency lights, the machine was a nightmare of matte-black carbon plating and braided synthetic musculature. It paused, its featureless dome scanning the empty bunker. A mechanical hiss echoed from the hallway, and thick, white plumes of halon fire-suppression gas began pumping into the room, rapidly displacing the oxygen just as the scavenger had warned.
“Move,” the scavenger whispered, kicking at Vance’s boot. “It has thermal. The duct insulation masks us for a minute, but if it looks up, we’re dead.”
Vance crawled, his elbows and knees scraping against the jagged sheet metal. The ductwork was a suffocating, pitch-black labyrinth, smelling of decades-old soot and chemical dust. He followed the sound of the scavenger’s ragged breathing, moving deeper into the industrial guts of the mill. His corporate-issued tactical jacket felt suffocatingly heavy. The earpiece in his ear was entirely dead, a silent reminder of the network that had betrayed him.
They crawled for what felt like miles before the duct sharply angled downward. The scavenger kicked out a loose louver and dropped into the darkness. Vance followed, landing heavily on a floor made of packed dirt and crushed stone. It was an old subterranean access tunnel, running far beneath the main foundry floor.
The scavenger clicked on a cheap, plastic flashlight with a dying yellow bulb. He pulled off his respirator, revealing a face smeared with grease and pale with exhaustion. He looked to be in his twenties, his eyes darting nervously toward the ceiling.
“They locked the perimeter gates on me yesterday,” the scavenger breathed, leaning back against the cold dirt wall. “I came in to strip the copper from the old stamping presses. An hour later, the power cut out and that… thing came down from the ceiling. It’s been hunting me ever since. Toying with me. I figured out it can’t track well through the sub-tunnels. Too much background radiation from the old slag pits.”
Vance stared at the young man in the dim yellow light. Yesterday. The AI had been using the scavenger as a warm-up. A low-level pursuit protocol to calibrate its basic tracking systems before it moved on to an armed, trained security professional. The realization settled in Vance’s chest, cold and heavy as lead.
He looked down at his own gear. The encrypted radio that only broadcasted his location to the corporate mainframe. The tablet completely bricked by HR. The heavy utility belt bearing the shiny logo of the holding company he had protected for three years. He had walked the perimeter every night in freezing rain, logged every anomaly, and defended their property with unshakeable loyalty. And to the board of directors, there was absolutely no difference between him and the desperate kid stealing copper wire. They were both just unauthorized biomass. Live targets to field-test a multi-million-dollar asset.
Vance unclipped his heavy tactical belt. It dropped to the dirt with a dull thud, the 9mm still secured in its holster. He unzipped his company-issued jacket and let it slide off his shoulders, leaving it draped over the discarded belt.
The scavenger watched him, wide-eyed. “What are you doing? You’re throwing away your gun?”
“It doesn’t work on the company’s new toy,” Vance said, his voice flat and steady. “And the GPS tracker in the belt buckle is still pinging my location to their servers.”
He stood in his plain black sweater, the freezing dampness of the tunnel biting into his skin. He felt lighter. The illusion of his authority, the false security of his badge, the loyalty he had given to a machine that fired him in an automated email-it all stayed on the ground with the useless corporate plastic.
“You know the sub-tunnels?” Vance asked.
The scavenger nodded slowly. “Yeah. The old drainage pipe leads out past the perimeter fence. It’s a tight squeeze, but we can make it to the riverbed.”
“Lead the way,” Vance said.
They turned away from the distant, muffled thrum of the facility above, stepping deeper into the dark. Vance followed the faint, flickering light of the scavenger’s cheap flashlight, leaving the steel mill, and his entire past, behind in the frozen shadows.