| Generated by Google Flow text-to-video AI software, powered by Veo 3.1, and Google Gemini Pro, powered by Lyria 3 |
August 27, 2526. The ragtag group of survivors have almost made it. They can
see the Chappa’ai Mountains up ahead. They will still want to get as far
north as they possibly can, but according to the science, crossing that
threshold will allow them to breathe a sigh of relief. The ground is more
stable and solid. After all this, salvation is within their grasp. So of
course something else has to get in the way. And it’s huge.
“Brake!” Breanna orders. “Brake, brake, brake!” she repeats.
“I see it!” Cash responds, matching her energy. She can’t brake any harder
than this, though. It’s just a button, and it does what it does as fast as
physics allows.
“Hold on!” Breanna shouts. Even though she’s magnetized to the floor, she
reaches up and takes hold of the overhead oscilight for balance. They
certainly don’t need it to see, and if anyone is on the tracks, the oncoming
railcart is the least of their concerns. Before them, the ground is opening
up. The mountains are sliding apart from each other. They can see the red
glimmer of the vengeful lava below, even as the day side begins to overtake
the shrinking breadth of the Terminator Line. “Be prepared to jump if I say
so! It may be our only hope! Once we do, you’ll wanna start running in the
opposite direction! But not yet! We’re still moving too fast!”
“Can we just parachute off!” someone asks.
“Too much turbulence!” Breanna cries back. “Just wait for my
instructions!”
They all scream into the comms. Even Tertius and Aeterna look worried,
though that may be more from empathy than fear. The chasm is pulling the
tracks ahead of them down now, along with the spine that led others up to
the safety of the pole. Hopefully, no one is in them right now. The train
stations have all become non-operational, but that doesn’t mean no one is
trying to walk it. Breanna isn’t so sure about her instructions anymore.
There may be nothing they can do. Even if they manage to stop, the ground is
falling away, and they don’t know when that’s gonna stop. The fact is, they
started this evacuation late, and got held up too many times. Survival was
never guaranteed. They did their best.
“Okay, bad news!” Cash says seconds later. “The brake broke! I’ve lost
control!”
Suddenly, as if in response to Cash’s problem, a large object flies in from
the side, and slams into the front of the railcart. There is no time to
figure out what it is. Two people are catapulted forward, one of them being
Aeterna, and the other unknown with their IMS fully on. They arch over the
object, and down into the bowels of the planet. Having finished saving the
cart, the beetloid drone reopens its elytra, and reengages its rotowings. It
dives down into the abyss. They hold their breaths and wait, too afraid to
move on this precarious cart. It could tip over too at any second, and they
want the beetloid free to rescue them again, so they’re gonna let it finish
its latest mission. After a minute or two, it darts back into view, and
lands safely on the tracks behind them.
Only one person is sitting on its head. They slide off, and appear to be
hyperventilating, but otherwise alive. Tertius looks over at Breanna. “I
missed out on 200 years with my daughter. I just got her back. I can’t
abandon her again.” He leans back and lets himself fall into the chasm.
Okay, he may have survived the pyrotornado somehow, but they’re not
surviving that!
“We need to go,” Cash says.
Breanna doesn’t move. She’s looking out at the impassable new obstacle,
thinking about the Valerians, and in general how deep of shit they’re in.
“Bre! We have to go!” Cash urges.
Breanna nods, then follows the group off the cart. They all stop and look
back when they hear the sound of metal scraping against metal. The cart has
finally slipped over the edge itself. “Go into a light jog, but slow down if
the tracks start to feel unstable. We wanna get as far from that thing as
possible, but not if that means falling over the edge anyway. Even away from
that chasm, we’re pretty high up.
They go a little under a kilometer back southwards before finding a ladder
to climb down to the surface, where they start walking westwards, trying to
see where the new chasm ends. A young woman named Calypso rushes up to
Breanna. She’s the one who fell over with Aeterna. “Why did it save me? Why
did it save me and not her?”
Breanna looks over at the beetloid, which is walking alongside them like a
loyal dog. It’s a specialized service drone. She’s not exactly an expert on
them, but she wouldn’t have thought they programmed it with any sense of
duty to rescue humans. But maybe they did, or maybe someone modified it
aftermarket, or maybe it’s learning. “I can’t say for sure, but my guess is
it calculated the likelihood of survival. Had it not caught you, and brought
you back up, you would have fried in the toxic gases before your body could
have hit the bottom. Aeterna was practically naked. It probably figured that
she was already dead. There was no point in trying to rescue both of you,
and losing the one person who might still stand a chance.”
“Is she? Is she dead?”
“If she’s not, I don’t know how she would get out of that. You don’t really
sink in lava, but that’s because your body would be incinerated on the
surface. But if she’s a god, and can survive that, she might not be able to
get out anyway. I can’t imagine we’ll be seeing either of those two ever
again.” That’s what they assumed last time, however.
“There,” Cash says, pointing. “That hill takes us high enough.”
“High enough for what?” Breanna asks.
“To parachute. We’ll glide across the ravine, and land on the other side.
The plumes of gas actually help us. It won’t be easy, but it’ll get us
there.”
“Well, you remember that the two of us don’t—” Breanna tries to begin.
“It will get us there,” Cash interrupts.
Brenna shakes her head, and looks at her wrist interface. “It’s already
quite hot. The day side is drawing closer. We shouldn’t go that far west.”
“We won’t be there long,” Cash justifies. “We’re just gonna jump off and go,
and then we’ll scramble back to the Terminator Line, and continue
northwards.”
“Fine. Let’s take a vote,” Breanna says. “Fair warning, your parachutes
might not make it. Those fumes are dangerous. We’ll have to teach you how to
control them, you might need to change directions midflight, and you still
might come up short. I will say, there’s nothing for you on this side.
The northern pole is the only option.”
And so the group heads for the hill in the middle distance. Breanna and Cash
choose not to tell the others that there’s a problem.
“Wait, what about that thing?” Cash suggests.
“That?” Breanna looks at the Beetloid again. “That can only hold one
person.”
“We could play Rock, Paper, Scissors for it?”
No comments :
Post a Comment