The daring escape from the Renaissance Facilities results in the tragic removal of a primary personnel. What will become of Cydia now?

Word Count: 52,022

We didn’t get very far. Dumbstruck, we all stood outside those double doors, looking collectively at what we had found, mulling over the significance of it all. Maiya shook her head, “We’d better get going.” She stopped looking at The Collective and started down the hallway from where we’d came. Before following her, I took one last look inside The Collective’s housing chamber. I didn’t really notice it then, but a fetch in the far ends of the room was twitching – its hands moving, every so slightly. Thinking nothing of it, I went off with Curie and Maiya, following closely behind the latter and I assuming that Curie wasn’t far behind. I was right, in a sense.

Walking down the hall, I quickly noticed the absence of Curie’s footsteps. I turned around quickly, and Maiya followed suit, hearing the squeaking of my shoes against the smooth, reflective flooring. I saw Curie standing dead still about fifty feet away, not moving, not even shaking. I didn’t see what was causing this until I stepped to the side – a man in a dark suit was holding a gun to the back of Curie’s head. And, just like that, as quickly as I had turned around and seen the man, the trigger went off.

The sound of the gunshot echoed throughout the facility, bouncing off of the mirrored walls. Infinite gunshots. Infinite death. Adam Curie’s lifeless fetch slumped to the floor, a useless hunk of broken technology. Oily blood leaked from the gunshot wound onto the floor, staining its perfection. I looked at the puddle of blood, at the man, and at Maiya behind me. Maiya turned around and began walking away.

“Hey!” I shouted, trying to call her back.

She reached into her pocket and pulled out her Mu Gun. Pointing it behind her, she shot a beam of solid blue light at the perpetrator of the shooting. He attempted to dodge, but his head became covered in a sphere of light. Blinded by the glow, he could go nowhere.

Maiya manipulated the Mu Gun, and I heard a crunching noise. She’d caved in the sphere of light on the killer’s head. Oily blood burst forth from the sphere, splattering the walls and falling down on the floor. Maiya retracted the light, and I saw just how mutilated this man’s skull had become; the artificial brain from inside his fetch was not only exposed, but broken into pieces. Wiring strung through skin and organs. Bones dislodged and skinned.

And this man’s body fell right on top of Curie’s. I would have moved it myself if I hadn’t been so speechless.

Maiya put her Mu Gun away, and I turned around to watch her leave. I couldn’t decide whether to simply leave Curie’s body there, but Maiya decided that for me. “It’s useless. They’re both inside The Collective now. There’s nothing we can do.”

I ran and caught up to Maiya, who continued speaking. “Even if there is a Corpus Lock here, we’re going to end up dead before we find it. It’s too dangerous to be down in the facilities. We need to escape, and fast.”
“But how? I haven’t seen an exit anywhere.”

“I know where one is, though I’ll bet my money that it’s guarded. We could take on the guards, or find another route.”

“I have a feeling we’re going to be taking on guards either way at this point. We may as well try and run our way through the exit and hope they don’t shoot us dead.”

“Don’t be an idiot. We’ll be killed long before we reach the exit. They don’t want patients escaping, you know. And that’s what you are to them – a patient. A feisty one, but just a patient. They’ll be looking out for you, like they were looking for Curie. Don’t you think that’s why they killed him just now? Don’t you think they have no tolerance for rogue patients? I’d say they only have one goal – systematically assimilate everyone into The Collective. If you’re not systematic, you’re dead.”

“I see. Then, what do you suggest?”

“I don’t know yet. But I’m sure there’s an emergency exit out here that isn’t being guarded. We could get through it and make our way to the nearest rasase injection site to see what we can do there. Did you manage to steal a map of this place while you were at those terminals?”

“No, I didn’t. I’ll be we could go back and get one, though.”

So we both agreed – we were to head back to the site of Vosler’s killing in order to download a map to the facility from the terminal. I had a gut feeling that there would be suspicious characters roaming the kill zone, for reasons I thought sounded obvious. I suppose they didn’t seem so obvious to Maiya – or maybe nobody really cared about Vosler. Regardless, I’d quickly gotten into the habit of trusting Maiya down here, most likely when I shouldn’t have.

We reached Vosler’s corpse, only the corpse aspect of it was missing entirely from the scene. In fact, everything had been cleaned up – as if nothing had happened! Why was nothing there? I looked at Maiya; she smirked. “They’ve been here,” she said. “Alright, now where’s that terminal…” She began running down the halls, looking for the room I’d met her from. When she found it, I saw her figure abruptly disappear from my view. Within seconds she reemerged, smiling. She held up a glass panel, copied it, and tossed the copy over to me. I caught it only through reflex.

Looking at the map, I got a sense of scale for how grand the Renaissance Room truly was – it wasn’t just a room. It wasn’t even a facility. It was an entire network at the core of Cydia, a whole infrastructure from which several research labs jutted forth and branched out, curving around The Collective at its center. And on the map were elevators to the surface, numerous elevators.

Maiya began to draw on her map with her finger, which simultaneously drew on mine. She circled an elevator not far off from where we were.

Unfortunately, it doubled back through the large laboratory I’d first tackled Vosler in, which I already knew was heavily guarded. I was unsure of how we would get to the elevator without getting caught, but I saw Maiya draw a path not marked on the map.

“There’s a maintenance tunnel here. It’s not on the map, because it’s not in use. But it goes straight to the elevator. We can hitch a ride that way and get to the surface.”

No sooner has she said that than was she bolting down the hallway towards this supposed maintenance passage. I was surprised to find that she was right – we found the passage blocked by tile on the wall, but only after ripping off some of the reflective tile. Behind the mirrored shards was the least polished walkway in the facility – a remnant of a time long passed. The pathway was dark; pitch black. Seeing no lights inside the passage, Maiya and I procured lights from the augmented reality of our glasses. We didn’t bother sealing the way behind us; if anyone was going to come for us, they were going to come for us no matter where we were, no matter how far or fast we ran – and so we took off into the darkness, unafraid of what might be following not far behind.