Prologue – Dissidents of Utopia

My mind always retreats back to the stench of burning plastic. A pillar of black smoke rising up into the otherwise pristine blue, cloudless sky. The Battle of the Citadel, as the historians call it nowadays. 

The outside didn’t look too impressive, really just a white painted concrete mesa rising up over the muddy wastes of Antarctica. Each side hosted two roller doors, although out of the eight sides two had been breached and were the source of the churning black smoke. When our APC got close enough we circled around in front of one of the busted doors. After a few cycles it seemed as if nobody was attacking us, whatever was going on inside was more important, so we jolted to a stop and charged out of the vehicle. 

For about five seconds everything was calm. Tense but calm. The First looked through a scope and examined the structure. We had been sent to investigate. What the hell was going on in there? We were the first on scene. Just after we had enough time to think we weren’t in danger yet, the APC exploded.

The air felt heavy for a moment, then we felt overwhelming force. Everything felt sharp, but at least my body armor protected me. The APC wasn’t destroyed, just hurled back and dented massively, but Ashbee and Romero were next to it, and they were shredded, their body armor crumpled, anywhere there was exposed flesh, it was covered up in dark red. The First stood paralyzed, incapable of moving. Martinez, Reese, Murakami and Tran were all shocked and confused. 

None of us had been in a hot conflict. Our mission was to monitor, to sit and watch. We had been through training and simulations, but it was different in the chaotic haze of churning smog and the stench of scorched blood.

“Layton,” I yelled, at the First. He didn’t react. I heard pops and something whizzed by my ears. I turned toward the sound. I could see two shapes disguised by the black smoke. I motioned at them and shouted, “Suppressing fire! Get ‘em!” 

We fumbled with our rifles and fired in their general direction, and made our way toward the Citadel. The last residents entered eighteen years ago, the last few refugees fleeing the revolution. Ten years ago a diplomatic mission met with the residents, but there was no political solution. And so we stood watch surrounding the Citadel from all sides and we waited to see what would become of the last capitalists on Earth. And their workers.

I got hit by two bullets as we made our way across the field. The armor held, those only left bruises. Tran took a bullet in the elbow, which made it through to her flesh, but we had enough plasters at that point to at least keep her ambulatory. Once we had a semblance of cover, I looked back at the First. He was still just about where we left him, except now on the ground. The APC we rode in on was moving awkwardly. Mahmoud must have survived. Bullets pecked at it but couldn’t get through the armor. The artillery had really fucked it up, though. It was upright and its wheels were on the ground, but an entire side of its hull was gnarled in on itself. The wheels were misaligned.

We got up against the walls of the Citadel, just in front of the busted roller door. On instinct, we all kept our rifles trained on the black smoke pouring out, looking for any shape that was vaguely human. The stench was uncontrollable, even through our rebreathers. They weren’t ready for whatever the fuck this was.

I checked comms. We couldn’t get an outside signal. The wireless was flooded with garbage, likely a countermeasure to keep us out of contact with the Citadel Outposts and the rest of the world.. 

“Fuck! What do we do?” said Reese. 

“We gotta get those fucks inside here,” I said, “Then we gotta figure out if they have more of whatever the fuck that artillery was. Green, Cyan and Magenta units should be here soon. We can’t risk losing any more comrades before we even get inside.” 

As if on cue, a hard shape bounced out of the pouring smoke, a little metal cylinder. On muscle memory I shot a countermeasure at the object. A ball of goo hit it, shuddered, inflated, and deflated into a mushy pile. 

Martinez lobbed a can of audio chaff. Immediately, my headset filled with a low grade audio growl. From inside the Citadel we heard someone shout incoherently.

I inhaled sharply and bolted around the corner. From inside the churning smoke I could make out the two human shapes a little better. They were struggling to cover their ears. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” they shouted. Our headsets were calibrated to offset the audio chaff, but clearly the militias of the capitalists weren’t so forward thinking. I pulled the trigger on my rifle. After a short spray one of the bodies fell. I think it was Murakami, who was next to me, who took out the other one. Nothing else shot at us, then. Together we stepped inside the Citadel. 

It was hard to make out the shape of anything from the inside. The black smoke was everywhere. You could see maybe a meter in front of your face, beyond that churning inky black. The HUD said we were inhaling trace amounts of chemicals with names too long to remember, but our rebreathers were keeping the vast majority of it away.

I stepped up close to the two shapes that shot at us. They were in heavy gear, body covered in plate carriers and equipment. Their armor showed evidence of more bullets than just what we had shot at them, but we also got them in the small areas between the plates. They had helmets that covered their entire heads and the clear shield over the face was smeared with clownish paint, a bloody smile.

Inside there were a few vehicles, but it wasn’t clear exactly what they were at at a distance. When we got close we identified two APCs and two small devices that seemed like snowmobiles, but with missile batteries mounted on top. Three missiles were missing from one of them. 

“Tran, I know you got hit, can you have a look at these things? Figure out how to shoot them? And Martinez, can you keep watch? Everybody else, we should delve deeper into the Citadel and figure out what the hell is happening here.”
I hadn’t been elected leader. I didn’t want to be a leader, frankly. I was happy to just put in my six hours, do my job competently, and go home at night. But events caught up with me. When all hell broke loose my mind just… sharpened. It’s hard to describe to a civilian. I had to make sure my comrades would survive, so I did what I had to do. 

Me, Reese, and Murakami explored the Citadel. Construction began almost a century earlier, long before it was a fait accompli that the working class of the world would finally succeed.  The area had been picked out because it was remote, Antarctica was thousands of miles from anywhere, and the glaciers were quickly receding. It was a massive project. The first tunnels emptied were uneven and hard to navigate. Originally, these had been the crew quarters for the miners excavating the deeper tunnels. Later, they evolved into the area for staff, the potentates buried far deeper in the Earth. Now, they were a war zone. 

The walls of the tunnels were smeared with blood and cracked with explosions. The tunnels were roughly circular with a flat bottom and a radius of about ten meters. The walls were made from some kind of metal and painted a pure white. It showed scratches just about everywhere. There were vents all over the place, no way you could survive down this deep with as many people as the Citadel was supposed to house without them. Many areas were caved in at least partially, and just about all of them seemed to be recent. The air was stale, but at least that horrible smoke didn’t fill this area.

After we had been exploring the depths for perhaps a half hour we heard something that sounded like voices, a little far off, but a lot of them. We made our way through more tunnels and the sound grew louder. Finally, we turned a corner, and there were a few large men holding shotguns. 

“Hold it right there you fucking communists, we’ll shoot the lot of you right fucking now!” the largest one shouted in English.

I lowered my gun. 

I said, “We’re not here to hurt you. There’s black smoke coming out of the Citadel. We came to investigate.”

The big man stared at me nervously. 

“Comrades,” I said, “Put your guns down. We’re not here to hurt these people.” 

“Seriously?” Murakami said, “They got shotguns on us.” 

I grabbed the barrels of Murakami and Reese’s guns and pointed them at the floor. The shotgun guys did the same. 

I said, “What the hell is going on here?” 

“Sorry. Shit’s fucked up. Fucking Ermund Musk,” said the big man, weakly. “He’s lost his goddamned mind. He’s been cutting power to the algae pools, we’ve been on a starvation diet for months. He just cut the rations again, then, well, this all happened.” 

  The large man went on to explain the political situation. There were factions, one of the other billionaires didn’t like Musk’s approach to managing the Citadel, and this all popped off. This small crew were protecting a group of essential workers who managed the air filtration system. 

After all that, the big man eyed our backpacks. “So. What kind of equipment you guys have? Rations? How long you figure you’ll be down here?”

I said, “Hopefully not too long. Each of us carries a week’s rations in our packs.”

“So what’s in them rations?”

“Everybody has their own choice. My rations are mostly curries, some pies, most people don’t like the MRE fufu, the texture is weird. Guess it has to be to make it shelf stable.”

“Fufu? What the hell is that?” said the big man. 

I didn’t know how to answer this question. What did this man eat?

“It’s like,” I said, “A cassava dumpling?”

The large man said, “What the hell’s cassava? No, forget it.”

I said, “If you want the curries I’ll give them to you. What I’m hoping for is that you know a thing or two about the comms system. Our signals back to base are getting blocked.”

“Okay,” said the large man. “Gimme your curries, all of you, and I’ll have a man lead you to the comms station. Pretty sure it’s defended. I won’t help you with that, but I won’t try to stop you if you want to take it either.”

We shook hands and soon we were off. But after we made it down two tunnels we heard echoes from the direction of the shotgun guys. Gunshots. The shotgun guy we were with looked backwards. 

“All right, look, I’m gonna go scout out the comms station. Give me directions. The rest of you go back and help defend the outpost,” I said. 

“I dunno, man, you sure that’s a good idea?” said Murakami. 

“No, it’s a bad idea, but it’s the right thing to do,” I said. “I won’t engage the enemy. Better to build our relationship with the poor bastards trapped in this thing.” 

My comrades didn’t argue after that, and I continued on to the comms station. The gunshots in the distance got worse. A few shotgun blasts echoed heavily and I heard the sound of our rifles. Then nothing. 

The tunnels were lined at the top with conduit pipe and the bottom had two metal walkways to the side of a row of tarmac in the middle. Every few hundred feet I would find a pile of boxes stacked up in the row, or a strange vehicle I didn’t know the purpose of.

Still, there were more gunshots in the distance, barely audible.

I got distracted trying to discern what was happening back at the outpost, then a bullet hit my chest plate.

I ducked behind some kind of truck and a few more bullets whizzed over my head. They ricocheted off the walls in the distance. Only one shooter, I was pretty sure. I poked an armor plate out from behind cover. They shot again, this time missed completely.

I got a pretty good idea of where they were from the sound. I looked around for advantages. A few cardboard boxes, not much.

I poked an armor plate out from behind cover in a different location. Again they tried to shoot me. 

 The shooter had good reflexes, bad aim. Perhaps they were panicky, hard to tell much else. I kicked a cardboard box out in front of the truck and spun out from the other side. They took the bait, and shot the cardboard box, this time hitting it, and while they were distracted I shot them. The shooter fell.

I waited for a moment, but they very quickly stopped moving, so I continued on. The body was sprawled out at the bottom of a large cantilever door marked “Network.” I stomped up toward it, and kept my gun trained on the door as I approached. Too late to merely surveil, and I couldn’t go back now. 

The door was six meters square and rolled into the wall with a mechanical arm. I examined the controls. Then the corpse of the shooter moved. 

It jerked up, pointed a side arm at me and fired. It hit dead center in my chest plating. Blinding white sparks shot out, I was disoriented. My rifle started to burn. Initially, I didn’t know what to do with it, I swung it around. It began to fire on it’s own. It unloaded the rest of my cartridge in the general direction of the shooter. This time he made horrible noises and I smelled blood. 

My chest armor felt hot, the heat was increasing every second. My flesh burned. I hit the quick release and my plate carrier tumbled to the floor.  

I hobbled a little bit away from the scene for a moment to catch myself. My vision slowly returned. I saw shapes, and they came back together. My armor plates were burned through completely. And the shooter had been a young man, dyed green hair, and now most of his brains were on the floor. 

I wondered what his name was. Fuck. But I didn’t have time to process what I had just done. From inside the network station I heard a young girl’s scream. 

I took a deep breath and hit the green button on the door controls. To my shock it rolled open. 

“Who the fuck is that?” said a shrill voice in English in an unplacable almost fake sounding accent. 

“I’m a soldier with Citadel Observation. There’s black smoke billowing out of here, we came to investigate. We don’t mean any harm, we simply want to help in a humanitarian manner.” 

“Fucking communist bastards! You sabotaged our food system!” 

I pulled out my sidearm. I probably should have run. I could have made it back to the outpost. But I didn’t. I made my way through the network station. Racks of partially disassembled servers were spread out around the floor. There was a large device on the back wall. Next to that was a refrigerator. In front of it stood Ermund Musk. He looked older than he had two decades ago when he retreated here, even more than two decades would probably do. He was standing in a pool of blood. 

And next to him was a little American girl, perhaps six years old, with red hair. She was hooked up to some machine, and the machine was hooked up to a slowly filling bag of blood. 

He immediately trained his pistol on me and shot. It hit my arm. I felt a sharp pinch, then throbbing pain. I ducked behind a server. 

Ermund Musk laughed in an unsettling, strangely alien way. 

The gunshot was just a small flesh wound. It hurt, didn’t seem to have hit an artery though. 

I said, “I’m not here to hurt you.”

Musk said, “You’re a fucking communist homo. Of course you’re here to hurt me. You want to take my immortality away from me.”

I had read about billionaires growing up. They seemed so distant, so inhuman, obsessed with things that made little sense. I always assumed that was propaganda, that nobody could be like that, but suddenly I wasn’t so sure.

“Oh, right,” said Musk, “Come out, and drop your gun or I’ll shoot the little girl!”

“What?” I said.

“I’ll definitely shoot the little girl. I don’t give a fuck, you commie fuck!” 

What was wrong with this guy? I threw the gun on the ground and stepped out from behind the server with my hands raised. 

Musk said, “This is epic. I’m gonna get to kill a commie, and it’s even a black commie, the worst kind of commie, right Lucy?” 

The little girl stood stone faced and absolutely still.

He stepped nearer and examined me closely. 

“Your party bosses keep you well fed,” said Musk.

“I eat to my fill.” 

Musk picked up my sidearm. He examined it. 

“Piece of commie shit,” he said. 

He pointed it at my leg and shot. A sharp explosion of pain. I fell to the ground. 

He laughed his fucking alien laugh again. 

Musk said, “Perhaps it’s not so bad. At least it cleans up the trash.” 

He pointed the gun at my head and pulled the trigger. Nothing. 

“No, no,” said Ermund Musk, “It is commie trash after all.” 

Fuck. Definitely nicked an artery, at least. My body very quickly felt cold. A throbbing ache in my leg. I felt weak and dizzy.

Ermund Musk pointed my gun at his own face and looked down the barrel. 

“Yeah, it’s jammed. What a piece of shit mechanism.” 

Then he tapped the gun with his other hand and it discharged. The bullet went directly through his face and out the back of his head. The bullet hit a machine in the back of the wall. He fell to the ground. No way he survived that. The light in the room faded momentarily, then returned to its former level.

I fumbled with my belt. Trauma foam. That would buy me time. But my hands wouldn’t grip it. 

The little girl stared at me, blankly, out of her mind. 

“L-lucy,” I said, “Is that your name? I need your help.”

She nodded and walked over to me. The blood drawing machine rolled behind her.

“Th-the can on my belt. It has a little straw.” 

She pulled it off my belt. 

“Push the top.”  

She pushed the top. A dollop of foam shot out, then exploded in size and snapped off the straw. 

“P-put it on my wound, please, and push the top.” 

She did as I instructed. 

I knew it was going to hurt. I prepared myself for the pain. I didn’t want to startle the child any worse than I had already. I shrieked. 

Lucy looked terrified, even worse than she looked before. Guilty. Horrified.

“No, no,” I said. “You did good. It was supposed to do that. The f-foam, it’ll slow my bleeding. It really hurts, but it saved my life.” 

Lucy looked at me and nodded. 

Then my HUD connected to the network.

Green, Cyan and Magenta teams were inside the Citadel, and Red team was making their way to my position. I passed out.