There's no "Our Day", part 1, chapter from sci-fi/post-apocalypse book series "Geryon's Code"

Brief: This is a chapter from my post-apocalypse saga "Geryon's Code" which is now being translated into English. The text is taken from the 1st book, "The No-Life Immortality" The parts of the novel and the related content will soon appear on Patreon as well. To make reading more comfortable for you, I divided the chapter into parts. Pictures are generated by Midjourney. Please don't hesitate to leave your comments and share your impressions.

December 23, 2144

“Mom, mommy!” squeaked the eight-year-old Midori, fiddling a limp, unnaturally dark-veined hand that dangled from the Omniverse-connected chair. "Wake up, the power’s off again!"

The girl put her thumb on mother’s wrist, almost as thin as her own. She felt a faint pulsation through the skin. That meant that mother would sooner or later wake up. After all, she always did…

As hungry as a shark, the girl ransacked the refrigerator and lit every inch of their miserable apartment with the flame of a candle. It turned out that her mother forgot to buy a red syringe that was necessary for exiting in emergency mode – in those cases, for example, when the network “fell”. Every time, when connecting to the Omniverse, she gave herself an injection of transparent liquid from a whit syringe. The girl didn’t know its exact composition, but she remembered perfectly well that if the light went out when her mother was connected, it was necessary to immediately inject the red substance. Earlier, the girl had had to perform such an operation twice, but this time there was no necessary “potion” at home. And Midori shuddered at the thought of what it might end with.

Here, on the Level Three of New Lower Brooklyn, long electricity blackouts were a regular occurence. This was due to the blockheads who didn’t know the measure in stealing electricity. Judging by the duration of the "eclipses", the city government either was in no hurry to eliminate the breakdowns caused by these thief wannabes, or it used the blackouts as punitive measures itself. Therefore, the people who had permission to visit the upper levels, among other things, brought stearin candles, which, despite their high cost, were as popular as hot sandwiches.

Previously, if after such incidents the perpetrators were discovered, lots of people came running to give them an illustrious thrashing. However, electricity was stolen not only by random jerks. Organised gangs needed energy even more – for powering their clandestine workshops that made fake identification chips, unlicensed brain implants, various drugs that would boost the player's performance in the Omniverse or grant “sweet hours” to those too poor for digital adventures.

They also dragged prohibited goods – mini-drones, weapons, high-capacity digital media – into the Underground. Nobody dared to touch the members of these gangs among the inhabitants of the lower levels – and not only and not so much because of fear, but also because these people were considered criminals only by the authorities and the inhabitants of the Top levels. Even the sweeps of the lower quarters by police drones, which often accompanied the “blackouts”, didn’t prevent the Underground people from respecting their outlaws.

At first, when the lights went out, the girl wasn’t afraid. Her and her mother's home was twenty square meters, which were illuminated by small spherical plants in hanging pots. This dim bluish glow was quite enough for them to move around the apartment and distinguish objects. Also, there were candles. Looking outside, Midori saw that the emergency lights were also functioning, which calmed her down a little bit. The only thing to actually fear was a possible meeting with a police drone. There were cases when these machines shocked children who foolishly tried to catch them or hit them with something heavy.

Midori's stomach churned. The girl took a glass of coconut jelly from the refrigerator, but before starting her meal, she tried to wake her mother again so that mommy would eat as well. There was still a pulse, but the woman didn’t react to either calls or shaking. Plucking up the courage, Midori climbed onto her mother's lap and with all her strength slapped on mother’s early withered cheek with her little hand.

“Get up!” She screamed with non-childish rage, squinting her eyes from the running tears.

Midori had the vaguest idea of ​​what the Omniverse really was. She knew that it was her mother's job – to connect to this thing and lie down for a good half of the day, performing feats in her sleep and getting money to feed their small family. Nevertheless, this smart girl had already managed to notice that such a dream didn’t provide real rest. When her mother got up from the chair, she looked absolutely exhausted, spoke little and slept for several more hours – this time on the water mattress, which they shared together. So Midori used to have just two or three hours of maternal attention.

The girl also noticed that her mom was rapidly aging. She was just thirty five years old, but looked at all fifty: dry yellowish skin tightly fitted her face, wrinkles spread around her eyes, her cheeks were sunken. Moreover, the woman had problems with motor coordination and short-term memory. In recent times, it happened that she couldn’t immediately remember even the name of her own daughter. Something bad was happening in this artificial dream, but what exactly… The mother didn’t like to talk about this and could even tell Midori to go to hell if she was too persistent in her curiosity.

It came to the girl's mind more than once that her mother hung out in the Omniverse for so long just to grieve less her beautiful life at the upper levels, which ended on that miserable day when she was thrown into a prison on charge of major cyber crime. A life in which she could enjoy real sunlight without any permissions, drive an electric car and buy dresses in expensive boutiques (others did not exist at the upper levels) was irreparably broken.

Sometimes a painful, tearful nostalgia swept over the woman, and she began sorting through either photos made in the world, from which she and her daughter were cut off forever, or her own portraits, revealing the chiseled, shining and well-groomed face that only the inhabitants of the Top could boast. Then she became more talkative.

“It’s dangerous to seek the truth,” she croaked bitterly. “I ran into the wrong people… I dug on the wrong people who had their own hacker. Not a human hacker, but some kind of weird AI. It didn't hack me. It didn’t break the processor, he didn’t erase anything, it didn’t even encroach upon my internal chips. I just went to bed, and when I woke up with five million on my account. Someone had stolen this money from the accounts of the company where I worked then. I didn’t even have time to get scared when the cops knocked down the door…”

But when Midori decided to clarify who her mother, in her youth, had so unsuccessfully tried to hack, mom angrily told her daughter to do homework and quickly left – probably to replenish the supply of drugs, which, unfortunately, weren’t at hand today.

Midori's mother spent three years in prison and found the release turned out to be even more terrifying. She was set free to only be "dropped down" to the very bottom, in all senses of this word. The Underground with enough light to exist, but not enough to actually live, reluctantly let people go, especially people like her – with the label of a criminal. On the contrary, it consumed and digested them forever.

In the lower quarters, children were rarely born. Most of them were "children of desperation". Mothers gave birth to them in order not to commit suicide and not to hang around for good. That's the way Midori came into the world. Of course, the Underground dwellers had never heard about family support from the government, so living with a child became twice as difficult. But somehow, it was family people and gangster clans, who stubbornly resisted the degradation that slowly and steadily choked the population, whose grandparents once believed in the "democratic" housing prices and rushed to buy or rent property in this ghetto.

Children broke down the monotony of tunnel life, giving hope to those who were sick of the fantasies of Omniverse architects. Midori didn’t know anything about her father, but the girl had no problem about that, because families with both parents were quite a rare phenomenon in the Underground.

Convinced that even the strongest slaps in the face wouldn’t wake up her mother, Midori slid off her knees, quickly swallowed a meager lunch (it was necessary to eat before any outing), removed the key to the apartment from the hook on the wall (it wasn’t possible to use hand scanning), put an extinguished candle in her pocket and ran out the door, but right there, without having managed to close it, she berated herself annoyedly and made a step back.

Having again run up to the motionless mother, the girl removed the handheld from her limp hand. Due to the frequent memory lapses, the woman wrote the code to this handheld directly on the refrigerator with a marker. Among standard applications, Midori found a “fitness tracker” app that marked the path traveled by the holder and the number of steps taken on the map. It was naive to believe that her mother, being a mistrustful and cautious (to the point of paranoia) woman, would leave the tracker on. But Midori decided to try her luck, and it turned out to be not in vain. The weakening memory forced the mother to use tricks here, so it became unnecessary to find the right path every time. For the first time, the girl really thought about what “work” cost her mother – and horror began to toss and turn in her stomach like a heap of snakes.

“It's her sacrifice to you, Midori,” said a merciless voice in her head. “It’s because of you. It would be better if you were never born. Then she wouldn’t fade so early. Now it's your turn to break your back and obtain what we need…"

Having appeared on the street, illuminated by ghostly white diode strips that stretched along the walls, the girl rushed to the place where the blue line on the screen was pointing at. Several times she almost smashed into passers-by, whose curiosity surpassed fear of a possible raid by drones. Having passed three crossroads, she had to slow down. The reason for that was not her fatigue, but a strange talk between a young woman and an elderly man standing around the corner.

"This time the Blackout is total, dad! The upper levels are dark, too!, at last" said the woman excitedly.

“Yep! And babies are delivered by drones!” the man grunted.

“I was walking along the bottom of the light well when my glasses broke down. The battery’s dead! I’m lucky not to be one of those pervert modificants! By the way, one of them was following me and stepped into the sunspot from the well. His hand switched off, I give you my word! It turned into a piece of metal”

Midori leaned against the wall, panting. Yes, it was necessary to hurry. But she felt the need to understand what was going on around and what to expect next.

“Come on, Liv! It’s a coincidence! Some jackass just installed his hand the wrong way” The old man continued to defend himself.

“Oh! Yeah! Some jackass, you say? So go on and try to catch at least a radio program! The broadcasting’s dead, too! Tell me, please, when was the last time this happened?”

“Even so… I think everything will be fixed in just two or three hours!” And you should get used to the fact that there is no our day.”

“And what if a world war broke out, and we hit each other with these EMI things... So what can prevent big players from banging each other from space?!”

“You’re a dreamer! Why should they? They want to live as much as we do…”

“And will sacrifice us without second thought.” The woman said. “Do you know what brother Alexander said at the same place yesterday?”

“If I listened to religious lunatics!” grumbled the old man.

“It's too bad!” Liv said heatedly. “He said the Purification would begin from one day to the next. There will be a great war that will last for a hundred years, and in the end we’ll have a united humanity with one sun for all of us!”

The old man didn’t have time to provide a new poisonous comment. They heard a great rumble above, and dust fell from the low ceiling.

“Oh! Holy... Shot and bash…” the old man muttered. “Who the hell would decide to go face to face? Are they too lazy to look for a ventilation outlet?”

As if someone agreed to his words, there was another boom from above.

“Someone will be shot without any drones today,” the man said with frightening indifference. “Let's go home.”

The word “shot” also reminded Midori about Alexander's sermon about the coming of the Final Judgment and the collapse of the oppressive society, which will begin from day-to-day. “Would it just a coincidence?” Midori thought to herself. “Maybe this unfamiliar girl Liv really took a wishful thinking?” After all, no one in their right mind could wish well to the biorobots who seized the top of the food pyramid.

The ceiling above her seemed to tremble because of the simultaneous stamping of hundreds, maybe thousands of feet, mingled with the echo of chaotic cries. But the girl, accustomed to spending most of her time in dull silence, didn’t even understand what kind of long, heterogeneous and unpleasant hum, muffled by thick layers of concrete, was that, and what kind of mechanism is capable of generating such sounds. Cringing with sticky fear, she moved on, looking for a trishaw as she ran. These guys have wild prices now, but who cares!

The rattling of a bicycle was heard quite soon. Judging by the sound it produced, the vehicle might be fifty years old. It was controlled by a dark-skinned (despite the absence of the sun), lanky, withered man, who resembled a shadow and was slowly chewing gum in the rhythm of the pedal rotation – his jaws were moving not just up and down, but from left to right as well. Despite the gloom of the underground street, he wore a funky hat pulled almost over his eyes. Midori had more than once seen this dude, but they had hardly exchanged more than five words. Even now, he didn’t say hello, but silently nodded. The girl, taking her place in the back, said almost in a whisper, “Blue Lane, forty five. I'm in a great hurry. That's a matter of life and death!..”