Voyage to Stratos Pelagia
Jackie leaned forward, her nanobot-fiber suit humming softly. The suit's metallic threads augmented her neural interface, synchronizing her human reflexes with her cybernetic processes. Her gaze traced the jagged peaks rising from the ocean, mist curling around them like a ghostly veil. Around them, the water hid skeletons of forgotten islands: half-submerged towers, corroded bridges, skeletal skyscrapers tilting at impossible angles. And the dark tip of a platform, waves crashing on its surface as if it were an unnatural shoreline.
"Are those… islands as well?" she asked. Her cybernetic eye automatically scanned the structures, overlaying probable load-bearing points, stability zones, and decay vectors. The ruins pulsed faintly, almost imperceptibly. Someone, or something, was maintaining them. Carefully. Deliberately.
Areas above the cresting waves humming with life to her sensitive cybernetic perception.
"Earlier prototypes," Sura explained. "Obsolete attempts at self-sustaining settlements. Some didn't make it past design flaws. Others were decommissioned once the newer models proved stable. Notice the residual energy nodes?"
Jackie's eye zoomed in, highlighting a lattice of faint, pulsing signals beneath the ruins. Even from this height, she could detect minuscule fluctuations—residual power from systems long abandoned. A curiosity formed in her cybernetic mind: could someone be using these ruins as a hidden base?
"Resistance?" she whispered.
Sura's expression didn't change, but the subtle shift in her eyes acknowledged her thought. "Possible. But we won't know until we're closer."
Her eye toggled to spectrographic mode, mapping the water's density, energy flows, and microscopic currents. The ruins' energy patterns were anomalous, but predictable enough that someone with knowledge—or a system like hers—could navigate them safely.
The transport moved over the largest of the ruins, a skeletal tower half-submerged in the water, shadows of bridges just beneath the surface. Jackie's eye highlighted the fractures in neon pink, mapping potential weaknesses. She overlaid a predictive model of stress propagation across the structure. Her cybernetic systems noted the faint signals of old maintenance drones, likely dormant for decades.
"Ghost cities," she murmured. "People must have left in a hurry… or been forced out."
Sura's hand rested lightly on the console, adjusting the transport's vector. "Keep your focus. Observation first. Interpretation second."
Jackie's eye continued its sweep, catching the faint glimmer of phosphorescent energy along the waterline—tiny bioluminescent currents amplified unnaturally. She traced them downward. Beyond the ruins, below the surface, a city thrummed softly, just out of reach. A fully functional cyborg city. Its energy fields hummed with life, systems integrated into the very bedrock of the ocean floor.
She blinked, momentarily forgetting to breathe. "One of our underwater cities?" Her cybernetic eye began tracking movement, 100, 500, 1000, 2000… Her human eye went wide. "It is still functioning and thriving below a dead island?"
Sura nodded, fingers hovering over a data uplink. "There are still things down there for them to do. Do you image the Directive places an island randomly?" Her tone was everything short of an eye roll as she continued. "The islands are placed about existing cyborg cities."
She shrugged and said nothing more, as if it were common knowledge.
Jackie frowned, there was so much she didn't know about her own world. As she thought this her system (BDJ she started calling it) spoke softly into her mind.
"subaqualis ore present in the bedrock below. Major ore vein mined only 15%."
Jackie nodded in understanding.
She adjusted the suit's neural interface through mentally projected commands. Metallic fibers aligned, nanobots running diagnostic sweeps to ensure no overexertion. Her eye projected 3D schematics of forgotten island over the transport's holographic dash, calculating descent vectors and environmental factors.
The twin peaks of the island rose higher, mist clinging to them, the southern edge housing a faintly glowing landing platform. The water below shimmered with faint energy traces from the submerged city—streams of pulsing blue and violet, feeding into stabilizing nodes that crisscrossed the ocean floor.
Jackie's systems highlighted a strange anomaly: microcurrents suggesting hidden energy flows. Unknown, unregistered by Nexus Directive databases. Her nanobot sensors ticked, integrating the data into predictive algorithms. Someone was altering, or maintaining, systems she wasn't supposed to know about.
Finally the twin platforms of Stratos Pelagia rose out of the fog like a silver mirage. The lower deck, a spider‑web of pistons, cables, and anti‑gravity nodes, floated just above the heaving sea. Above it hovered the true city — towers, plazas, and glass‑roofed transit halls — suspended on its own platform, gleaming like a second horizon.
From the transport's window, Jackie watched as the light of the ocean refracted off the support struts, dancing across her cybernetic eye in long green lines. The readouts ticked upward without her even asking for them:
> Hydraulic variance: 3.9%.
Micro‑stress fractures: 47 detected.
Options: Maintain / Optimize / Evacuate.
Her human eye blinked; her cybernetic one stayed fixed, the pupil contracting, data streaming like rain in the lower left of her vision. No one else sees this, she thought. They can't.
Across the aisle, Sura Tanith sat perfectly upright, her soft‑faced not giving anything away. Her slate‑gray engineer's coat crisp and pristine. Her badge glinted with the sigil of Patrick's lab.
Her cybernetics were few but seemingly vital. Both her legs were cybernetic and Jackie had heard rumors that her spine was as well.
But that was none of her business. She was here to learn, to grow, and to become stronger. Who Doc sent to protect her was not of her concern.
The transport descended, its grav‑struts humming. As they approached the lower platform, the air changed — tangy with salt and oil, heavy with the sound of machinery. A spiderweb of suspension bridges and catwalks led from the docking ring into the guts of the hydraulic core. Others rose up into the city itself and the second platform. The entire apparatus was huge. An actual city rising high above her, a marvel and a normality, in her world, at the same time.
Jackie felt her pulse quicken. This was no VR sim. One wrong calculation here and the city above could crack like glass.
Somewhere, between the ocean platform and the platform supporting the city, Lyra Keon sat on a thick black cable. She had been here for hours, unseen, her legs dangling over the massive platform separating the island from the ocean. The noise of the hydraulic systems reverberating through her. Both of her eyes — synthetic rubies set in carbon sockets — glimmered faintly as code scrolled across their surface. She reached into a pouch at her side and drew out a small, wet, black lump of clay. From the nape of her neck she pulled a thin, two‑pronged cable and without hesitation slotted one end into a port that swirled open at her temple, the other into the clay.
Her pupils flared to blazing garnet. Data surged through her at impossible speed, and a soft, almost maternal voice issued from the clay:
"Slow down, Lyra. You're processing too fast."
Lyra smirked, lips barely moving. "Why are you always such a mother, Tally?"
"I'm your failsafe, not your parent," the AI replied dryly, though there was warmth in its tone. Streams of code glittered in Lyra's eyes as she scanned the underside of the city, looking for anomalies. Officially, she was auditing population and load data. Unofficially, she was following rumors of sabotage — rumors the Resistance whispered about.
At a docking bay higher up along the lower platform Jackie and Sura waited for permission to dock. The transport hovered above the restless, ink-dark waters, its hull vibrating softly from the anti-grav repulsors beneath.
Jackie began to contemplate as she waited. The resistance, what did they want, what were they resisting, and what did they want with her?
Below them, Lyra's eyes flared as Tally murmured updates in her ear. "Hydraulic core reading unstable. Someone's patched something recently… badly. Or…" The AI hesitated. "Or intentionally."
Lyra's lips quirked. "Guess I'm not the only one down here running diagnostics."
She shifted her weight, scanning upward. Her ruby gaze caught a flicker of movement on the catwalk: a young woman with a cybernetic eye, data streams playing across her iris. Lyra frowned. "Who are you?" she murmured.
Jackie didn't see Lyra, not yet. But BDJ whispered into her mind:
"Two unknown signals detected nearby, to your 4 o'clock. One cyborg, the second AI in origin but advanced.
Data packet encrypted. Information: unidentified.
Destination: unknown
Would you like to track and intercept? Y/N
Jackie's eye scanned quietly. Advanced AI? How advanced? Would it detect her presence and he4 scan?
Far below, Lyra's AI whispered in her ear. "Multiple signals converging. It is not an out right scan but more a curious glance."
Lyra's ruby eyes narrowed. "I had a feeling that eye would be a problem. I wonder where she bought. It seems to be one hell of an upgrade to find us so quicjly." she said softly, tilting her head toward the girl above with the strange, glowing eye.
Something within her told Jackie not to look too deep and she forcefully stopped her probe. Were they Nexus Direcctive or Resistance? Did they know Kieran? She always seemed to have more questions than answers.
As she contemplated, somewhere beneath the city, Lyra Keon's ruby eyes went dark for a moment, as if something — or someone — had looked back at her.