The crew gathered into a pack, dressed in blacks, with full-face gas masks and kidney-shaped windows to see through. To outsiders they couldn’t be recognised, but they knew each other by the pattern of glo dots on their masks.

He loved adventuring with the crew. Clad up against the cold and the air they shouldn’t breathe, the oily smell of the condenser in his nose. Crisscrossing the streets like a drone swarm. Feeling more relaxed exploring the poison than in their homes.

The night was brown with air so thick he could only make out three yellow streetlights ahead. The ocean drew off some of the pollution but there were some days when there was no movement and the bacteria escaping the waste plants thrived, forcing everyone who went outside to wear masks or breathe it in.

Many of the old buildings were deserted and becoming derelict, too old to be made hermetic and ‘liveable’ though he could see fires flickering behind sheeted-up windows. Tom switched on the public augment layers and the street blinked, brightened with a multitude of advertisements and artworks, posts and messages.

He unchecked the commercial layers, the pop-ups and the social layer; leaving only his inventory and an unofficial graffiti layer.

They had such good senses of humour. Duckman was everywhere. Bubble-bodied human figures with ducks instead of heads. The Raz had installed non-interacting avatars all over the city. Curious ghosts repeating loops of movement. Erotic and toxic ghosts.

The crew cut through the school and Tom slowed down to watch the studious figures inside the library, bent over work stations or splayed in deep chairs immersed under visors, hands twitching. 

One of the students looked up. Her name was Lila. Tom had been in a class with her when they were younger. Short, neat and tidy. Socks and skirt parallel. Blunt bowl hair set like a geometric sculpture.

Lila saw him looking through the window and returned his gaze. Surely she couldn’t recognise him? Fattened by his layers, breathing mask and hood. The only features he had showing were his axed hair and green dots.

Whether Lila recognised Tom or not she raised her hand to wave. 

Tom stepped closer to the window, pulled the mask up from his face and spat on the glass.

A block before the corner, Pham’s brain beats bounced through his headphones. Ken Pham was a big guy, a foot above the rest of them. He lived with a grandmother who could only see people if they were standing under her nose. Their apartment had sensors to watch if she fell or stopped breathing and Pham would be auto-notified. Whenever they were out together they all listened to Pham’s beats.

Standing next to Pham was Tomiko Jones. He couldn’t see through her mask or hermi-suit but he knew it was her because she was the shortest in the group and her mask had four blue stripes. She was about to score-up to graduate and change schools. His mind had many memories of Tomiko Jones. She made extra credit letting her cams open. Every boy at school knew what she looked like underneath and she didn’t care.

MP was the last to show up. He had on a transparent poncho beaded with water that made him look like some sort of determined jellyfish. They called him MP as it was the last two digits of his rego number and his real name was too hard for them to say.

He wore spiked grippers on his hands from some new kind of sportsball and had a floppy roll of carpet over his shoulder.

‘Hey, she-baby,’ MP said to Tomiko with a pubescent resonance.

‘Crew,’ he nodded to the others, ‘Are we doing this?’

A while back MP had found this alley that wasn’t on any of the maps and tonight was the night they were finally going to investigate. On the tarmac was a fading ‘Interdict’ crossed-circle and the gap was just big enough for them to fit through sideways.

The way forward was dark. The street lighting, what was left of it, seemed as afraid to enter as he was. They switched torches on and stepped forward. Pham’s beats sped up and he timed in an echo loop.

The alley had become a dumping ground for waste from above, one long open midden that squished under their feet. At the end was a wall and a hole in the ground. It obviously led somewhere, their torches couldn’t reach the bottom and showed only a sloping descent covered with broken bottles. 

Last time this is where they had stopped, not wanting to risk puncturing their suits. Which is why MP had brought carpet to lay across the glass. 

‘Are you sure about this? We don’t even know where it goes,’ Pham asked.

‘That’s the point,’ MP said.

‘You don’t have to come,’ Tomiko answered.

‘It’s a test. Don’t you see? We have to show our resolve,’ MP said.

‘And what do we get?’ Pham asked.

‘We get to see what is on the outside. Off the grid.’

‘What if this is just a glitch? We could be wasting our time.’

How long are we going to stand outside of this hole?

‘I’ll go,’ Tom said.

They draped the carpet over the rim and rolled it over the glinting slope. Tom had to press flat on his stomach so his back didn’t scrape the other side. The others held his arms and slowed his downward slide. His foot crunched onto a bed of shards below.

Oh, just breathe. Breathe. Slowly.

‘Okay. I’m down. ’

The tunnel wasn’t high enough to stand without hitting his head. In a stoop he turned around with his cams open for the others to watch. A low mud tunnel yawned further in, completely dark but for the light from his torch. Even his enhancements didn’t reveal anything.

‘There’s a tunnel of some sort. I can’t see much.’

‘I’m coming down.’

Then a pair of legs began kicking around in the mouth of the hole. Tom grabbed them, ‘Just put your feet down. The ground is right below you.’

The legs stopped struggling and he guided them to set them on their feet. He didn’t know until she stood up that he had actually been holding the body of Tomiko Jones.

The tunnel ended in a broken wall which they easily climbed through. On the other side they found themselves in a silent junk yard crammed with tall columns of rusted hulks piled on top of each other. There were no lights but enough glow came from the surrounding city to outline the wreckage towers and cast shadows through the near darkness.

There was a drift of wind through the metal as they wandered around, and a faint scraping sound coming from further ahead. MP pointed his torch across the yard, in the far wall was another hole, and guarding it was a six-legged robot chained up like a dog.

As they got closer the bot noticed them. Its listless head froze in their direction then it jumped forward.

The chain shook with the force of its lunge.The crew screamed and jumped back.

Clthunk! It leapt again.

The others ran. They must have, as Tom was suddenly standing alone, just out of reach and letting it sniff him. From its snout gooey sensor tongues wiggled out and waved around, smelling first his face then armpits before backing away. He was of no interest to it. His wasn’t the flesh it hunted.

He sagged in relief.

It was so animal like, snuffling at him until it was sure he had nothing to feed it—he wasn’t on its list.

The killbot backed away and squatted in resting position. He reached out. Felt the rusted metal head, dry and old under his hand. It was almost like patting a horse. Or a horse skull.

He recognised the shell as one of Nerve Robotics civic defence units, though the insignias on it, those who had commissioned it, had been scratched off and weathered away.

The cracked wall behind beckoned.