Piwak

The Furians

Chapter 1

Veron-City: ninety million people, crammed together in a nightmare of concrete and glass. Drenched in flickering advertising holos that transformed the sky in the stinking permanent smog twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week into a colorful, loud Mickey Mouse world. I hated this city.

My name is Legger Piwak. I was once a god. The god of flintstones.

It was a Monday, of course, when it happened. Monday, August 4, 2064. I hated Mondays, and this one was no exception. My life up to this morning had been, let's say, comfortable. It consisted essentially of roaring construction sites, cafeteria slop, and the entertainment system of my apartment.

I was a transport pilot and assembly supervisor at Globalbuilding AG. My job was to monitor from the central control room the welding drones and the pilots of the assembly shuttles that mounted tons of window and facade elements onto the structural shells of the buildings. I cannot claim that my work fulfilled me. That was not the purpose behind it either. The job was well-paid and, except for various conflicts with the union that constantly wanted to dictate how long I had to work, not bad at all. Back then, I thought I was satisfied.

When I came to duty this morning, Vin from the reception already prepared me for a high-profile visit. "Dr. Zalakis is waiting for you upstairs," he said apathetically as I stepped into the elevator.

Jackpot. Of all people, Zalakis. The boss of the bean counters from controlling. Zalakis came from the fishing industry, which no longer existed back then, and was the brother-in-law of an investor. This toxic little man, a relic of an industry that had stripped away its own livelihood, wanted to explain to me how to do my job. This guy understood just as much about construction as I did about deep-sea fishing.

Hardly had I left the elevator when he rushed toward me and gestured hysterically with a blue plastic storage drive.

"Piwak!" he screamed excitedly. "34 percent!" he called out repeatedly as he came closer. "That is absolutely unacceptable! 34 percent we are deviating from the schedule! Do you know what the board will do to me if we postpone the handover date yet again?"

He squared up in front of any me. I was just about to catch my breath to say something, but he cut me off.

"This report states that eight drones have been offline for four days. That is your area of responsibility!" with that, he waved his memory card in front of my face.

Then he paused briefly, as if he expected an answer. I was not yet fully awake and searched for words, but two seconds later he was already screaming further:

"You, Stuart, and Weglav swing your asses into an overall right now, get into a shuttle, and do what you are paid for."

He raised his head, looked me straight in the eyes, and then said quietly:

"Or I will replace the entire staff of your department. And guess who I will start with. You have until Friday to synchronize the schedule."

I thought of the new media center that I had ordered slightly drunk over the weekend at CLR. I thought of the alimony for my ex-wife and of all the desperate people I saw every day on my way to work. I was standing exactly one millimeter away from the border to a life that I wanted to avoid under all circumstances.

My first impulse was to answer, "The drones are shit!"

The drones were shit. Whoever buys everything from the cheapest manufacturer only gets junk that constantly fails. I looked past Zalakis's bald head through a large glass window at the end of the corridor into the canyon of buildings of the millions-metropolis. I am replaceable. Just like one of these drones. I became angry, clenched my fists, and imagined ramming the goddamn memory chip into Zalakis's face.

Piwak!, my inner voice screamed suddenly. Don't say anything stupid now. Mind over matter, Piwak! Just this one time: shut your mouth.

"Yes, Sir!" I answered like a shot from a pistol and fixed my eyes rigidly on Zalakis's polished bald head.

"Good, Piwak," said Dr. Zalakis, visibly surprised by my sudden obedience. He turned around and called out loudly over his shoulder once more as he walked away: "Friday, Piwak! There will be no further discussion!"

My back was already killing me now; the comfortable chair in the control center had transformed my spine into marshmallows over the years, and the assembly shuttles were not exactly space wonders. "Typical Monday," I cursed on my way to the changing room to put on an overall.

The job required highest concentration and nerves of steel, especially when working today on one of the two towers of a mysterious institute. The Pi-Research Institute, a subsidiary of the Omni-Power Consortium, the largest energy corporation on the planet, was building two 900-meter-high towers in the industrial park of Veron, packed with state-of-the-art quantum technology and thousands of laboratories.

Three years I had already been part of this project, but about the true research assignments of my client I knew hardly more than that inside the towers, research was being conducted on the fundamental laws of the universe. The South Tower was already in operation, a colossus of glass and steel that bored into the sky and whose peak disappeared in the toxic haze of the megacity.

It was a day like many others, characterized by the monotonous roaring of the shuttle and the distant noise of the city, when the unthinkable happened.

A gleaming flash, almost silent, tore the air. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw how in slow motion the finished tower, on which we had worked for so long, collapsed into itself. The explosion seemed strangely muted, almost unreal, but the debris cloud that spread like a ravenous monster was only all too real. Out of the gaping wound of the destroyed building shot a focused, greenish-blue beam of light that expanded like a fan, straight toward my shuttle.

A reflex, a last desperate act: I tried to shut down the gravitation core to quickly lose altitude and escape the ominous light, but the flash had apparently caught me anyway.

Suddenly the surroundings disappeared. Will-o'-the-wisps flickered through the front windshield of the shuttle and flew through me like ghostly apparitions. Snippets of words from a colleague who panicked something into the onboard radio. The shuttle went into a heavy rotation. As tight as I could, I clung to my safety belt. Everything happened in fractions of a second.

Concentrate, Piwak, you have practiced this a thousand times, echoed in my head.

I jerked my arms forward, but the console in front of me suddenly became transparent and melted like thin ice in the sunlight out of my reality. Panic shot up in me. "Where is the goddamn shield generator?!"

Then the lights went out.

When I came to again, there was only darkness. Weightlessness. A taste of lemon. A thought: death. This must be death. No sense of time, no light. The shuttle was gone. Only a silent, deep black emptiness surrounded me. For an eternity. But before I could think the thought to an end, I felt a dumpy impact, followed by a flash of light that instantly brought the world around me back.

Where just now skyscrapers, air traffic, and advertising drones should have been, an endless desert now extended. Rocks, sand, mountain ranges on the horizon. Yellowish-gray ground that trembled in the shimmering heat.

Slowly my cramped grip released. The safety belt whirred and set me free. I looked around. No buildings. No vapor trail in the sky. No hint of civilization. Doch etwas stimmte nicht. It was not the foreign landscape or the accident. Something else. Something that was missing, but which I only noticed now. A shudder ran down my back. It was not the crash that scared me or the foreign environment. It was this eerie silence that penetrated through the titanium hull of the shuttle into the interior and made me shudder.

This "noise" I had never heard before. In my world, there were no noiseless places anymore. Nowhere.

I leaned back. All calm, Piwak. We are alive. That is the most important thing. I liked to talk to myself in the third person in such moments. That gave me the feeling of control. My shuttle, a wonder of technology, lay in the middle of an unreal desert, undamaged, but stranded.

Where was I? Had the explosion in the South Tower wiped out Veron-City? The complete city? Such a complete destruction was impossible. Against this spoke also that I myself was still alive.

Surrounded by the nothingness, I stared at the empty screen in front of me and switched the power supply on. A quiet whirring during the boot-up of the computer cut through the calm. Maybe the computer knows more?

"Computer, diagnostics."

The voice of the onboard computer sounded as serene as ever.

"Structural damage: none. Gravitation core: stable. Fusion reactor: stable. Satellite navigation: no signal. Troposphere coupling: no signal. Ground communication network: no signal. Position: unknown. Safety notice: surface temperature: 56 degrees Celsius. Protective measures recommended."

The navigation instruments spat out only error messages. I furrowed my brow. No signal on all networks... that is impossible. The computer must be mistaken. Maybe the shuttle did take a hit after all. There was only my cell phone left, it had a quantum uplink and was located in the rear compartment of the shuttle, in my backpack.

I had to get out. But can I even breathe here?

I typed hastily on the console to start a drone. "Show me the environmental data," I whispered and looked up through the roof window as the aircraft moved away rapidly into the gleaming sky with a quiet whirring.

That can take a while. I leaned back. I felt only a light, rhythmic humming of the fusion reactor. And this eerie calm made every second into an eternity. Then finally the data of the probe came in. Lists of atmospheric numbers and units of measurement that I did not know, sorted by the flight altitude of the probe, piled up on the screens.

My head throbbed. Annoyed, I swiped the colorful tables to the side.

"Computer: Analyze the air outside. Is the atmosphere breathable?" I did not have a spacesuit with me after all.

Three seconds later, the computer reported bored:

"Analysis completed. Nitrogen: 77 percent. Oxygen: 22 percent. Trace gases: less than 1 percent. Atmospheric pressure: 1013 hectopascals. Air composition: Breathable. No toxins. No measurable industrial aerosols."

Panicked, I climbed out of the glider, glowing hot air hit me. Blinded by the sun, I managed my way along the heated titanium hull to the rear compartment. Fortunately, I had taken the cell phone with me to work today. Hastily I switched it on. Nothing. No network. "No service available."

My hands trembled. A heatwave rolled over me, followed by a paralyzing fear. If this here was Earth, why then was the entire planet silent? And if the quantum flash had hurled me to a foreign world at the end of the galaxy? My shuttle was constructed for the assembly of skyscraper facades and not for interstellar travel.