Beyond Stratosphere - The Cellar of Mr. Greschnik

March 2068. Renka Solidarensk is still coping with the aftermath of his failed mission to Tokyo, now forced to live as a full-on robot bent to the will of Reiner Greschnik. Still, this is not going to stop him from trying to find dirt on his employer – dirt that might be hiding just under his mechanical nose.

Renka would have rolled his eyes, if his robotic head allowed him to do that. Absent that chance, he elected to grumble with resentment, as his fourth least favorite person entered his field of vision. Said fourth person was a Brazilian colossus with the build of an ox, shoulder-length hair tinted in some faint violet hue and a goatee of the same color. His eyebrows were prominent too, as much as his small pupils and his permanent grin. And, of course, his voice was as thunderous and annoying as an American Midwest summer storm – with a nice side dish of broken windows and tornadoes. So, when the big guy started to speak, Renka already knew that he had to tune down his hearing sensors by one level or two, just to be on the safe side.

“HA! HA! HA! Look if it isn’t Cinzinho! How is it going with your wool-less metal hide?”

Renka squared the man from head to toes, cursing against the fact that all of his weapon systems were forcefully disabled while he stood on Statosphere ground. He really, really regretted not being able to pull out his machine gun arm or hidden torso rocket launcher in that moment. So, he allowed his (digital) tongue to take center stage and respond to the humongous man.

“For the last time, you gross excuse of a shepherd, my name is Renka, not fuckin’ CINZINHO!”

“But you are so gray, and sullen, and dull! I’d call you Cinzinho, if you were a sheep of my flock, no doubt!”

“Good thing I’m not a sheep then!”

Renka groaned. Al del Toro. Such an annoying human specimen. Always talking about sheep, sheep, and sheep. That big dude really liked them, no questions asked, and he seemed to project that love on everyone he had around – to the point of being seen as a single-minded mononeural brute. A single-minded mononeural brute with arms so powerful they could crush heads like watermelons, though. That aspect made it hard to ignore him or make fun of him, especially since he was towering over everyone else, Angels included, by a good ten to thirty centimeters. Renka let himself slump on the wall, pulled down his hat, wiped his red shades. Del Toro and he were the only two male enforcers in the upper echelons of Mr. Greschnik’s private gotha, but he couldn’t feel any familiarity with that laughing, larger-than-life Brazilian bison. First, because del Toro was – well – Brazilian. That, in Renka’s brain, translated to ‘lazy third-worlder bum’, no matter the fact that Brazil was currently the fourth world economy (if anything, Renka never let facts get in the way of some genuine racial hate). Secondly, because del Toro was still a man. The only biological part left of Renka was whatever dried up brain was buried in a private Stratosphere cemetery half a year ago, after the unfortunate incident in Tokyo. Third, because del Toro was still unique. Renka, being a full on robot, was now a commodity. There were four or five more of him, spread around all Stratosphere facilities, probably all thinking the same: that it sucked to be Mr. Magnifico’s plaything. Unfortunately, getting along – even with copies of himself – was a chore. Renka was the exact type of person Renka couldn’t stand. They collaborated without a hitch, at least, but saying they weren’t happy about each other’s failure would have been a gross misrepresentation.

So, Renka #3 (that was his official denomination) felt like punching the wall every single time Al del Toro opened that wide mouth of his – no matter whether he wanted to talk about sheep or not. That brute and he were equal on paper, but couldn’t be more different in reality. He let his brain subroutines calm him down, slowly, slower than a human brain. Even if he was equipped with a fully artificial body, Mr. Magnifico had locks added to his brain to prevent him from thinking faster than a human. So, effectively, that made him no different than a gimped robot or a man trapped in a metal skin. No benefit, all drawbacks. That was painful – if being a replica wasn’t painful enough in itself. Oh, yeah, and of course he was expendable. Renka was a number. Lose one, two more are built. That sucked even more, if possible. The only real advantage of his predicament were his cloud-saved memories. Even if his body was destroyed – huge if – the data collected by his artificial brain were saved somehow, somewhere in one of Stratosphere’s massive decentralized server array. Renka was – for lack of a better word – immortal. A legion of abrasive, egoistic Polish robots that shared memories and ideals, plus a piqued misanthropy that felt just right.

Renka stared again at the mountain of a man that was standing right in front of him. Even if that savage clapped his headplates to the point of crushing them as a trash compactor would, that weird discussion about gray sheep would still live on. A blessing and a curse. He tipped down his hat, lowered his gaze to the ground.

“Don’t you have anything better to do than pestering me? I dunno, doggy-styling one of your damn sheep or two?”

As long as Al disappeared from his sight, the giant could have had his way with his whole damn herd and Renka #3 wouldn’t have batted an eye. What he needed the most now was peace, however it was earned. If that meant appeasing an alleged zoophile, so be it.

The wall became suddenly close. Very close. Uncomfortably close. Renka could record the smell of the plaster in his sensors, hear the cracks of the surface scraping the metal case he called ‘head’. And feel a hand coiling around his neck, a hand powered by a myriad of nanofibers, amplifying its strength to inhuman level. His cameras, too, saw something unexpected. Bloodshot eyes. Shrunk pupils. A grimace between rage and pain.

“…don’t say anything like that ever again. I love my sheep, but not like that! Not. Like. That. And you… you should go back being the little bitch you are and shut your mouth, Cinzinho. If you don’t want to be smashed to a pulp, that is.”

Al’s voice. Al’s voice was filled with resentment. Renka could feel it deep inside his artificial bones. A murderous instinct, one barely kept at bay as the savage’s fingertips trembled on the metal neck, avoiding the last push, the one which would have severed the connection. Renka’s pressure sensors registered its uncertainty, that self-control the giant was struggling to keep. Till the grip loosened, slowly, letting go of the mechanisms of his robotic body.

Renka glanced back at Al, at his heavy breathing, at his swollen artificial muscles. The mountain was staring at his own open hands, his palms, in silence. Silence he finally broke with a low whisper.

“They said that too, Cinzinho. That’s why they took away Branquinha and her sisters. That’s why I killed those people. That’s why I killed all of them.”

A grin opened on his face. A boisterous fit of laughter filled the room, echoing on the walls and going back to Renka’s sound sensors, registering in his brain against his will to process it.

“Well, never get between a shepherd and his flock! I’m sure they learned it the hard way! HA! HA! HA!”

Renka scrambled back, put some distance between himself and that bear of a man. That sudden downturn, that sudden mood shift. What did it even mean? Renka couldn’t help but wonder about it, before deciding he didn’t care enough about Al and his sheep shenanigans. That gigantic idiot was getting on his nerves, in a way few other foreigners had (Australian dinosaurs dare not apply). So, he turned around, grumbled audibly, walking farther and farther from that sorry excuse of a Brazilian caveman. That savage was definitely messing with him, no questions asked. So, Renka elected to ignore him and take the first turn on his left, without even checking where it led. The Stratosphere HQ in Prague wasn’t exactly a maze, but, if one wanted to disappear from sight, they had way too many chances to do that. Coincidentally (or maybe not), that was also the real goal of Renka’s seemingly aimless wandering. As the sound of the voice of that massive ox grew dimmer and dimmer, Renka felt his heart (the mechanical pump replacing it) lighter. That idiot played his part wondrously, without even knowing it. Now, Renka had some plausible deniability for what was going to happen. Feign ignorance. Pretend to be lost. Just to ‘accidentally’ walk down the stairs and reach the fulcrum, the deepest mystery he still had to solve about that building. Said mystery was now standing triumphantly in front of his eyes, as an unassumingly ordinary elevator. One that had been marked as ‘out of order’ for months, years maybe. Renka had noticed it during his first day at Stratosphere. In that occasion, his chaperone – none other that Mr. Magnifico in the flesh – remarked that it would be fixed ‘anytime now’.

Anytime now.

Fast forward to the present day.

Anytime now.

Sure.

A peeled-off sticker of Eikon, the Biblically Accurate Angel, looked at him from the shuttered doors of the cabin. That cute cartoon critter (could an eye with wings really be called cute?) wore a yellow safety helmet with a “men at work” sign on top of it. The color had faded away, leaving only a bleached shadow of its former self. Despite the passage of time, the elevator was still in a state of complete disarray. Why didn’t anybody try to fix it, so far? That was the question that bounced through Renka’s brain over and over – even when it was still made of squishy, greasy, biological gray matter. His metallic fingers slid on the closed door, on the striped tape keeping them from opening, on the button that was supposed to call the elevator to that floor. He glanced around, scoured the narrow alley with his sensors. No cameras. No surveillance at all. Just a couple fake mockups to give a false sense of security. Weird. Either that corner was of so little importance that monitoring it was a waste of time or there was something else behind it. If Renka were a betting man – and he was, at least before turning full toaster, which might or might not have been the catalyst for all of his woes – he would have put all of his money on the second. One piece of circumstantial evidence boosted his confidence: he had seen Mr. Magnifico disappear behind that corner, once. Disappear into thin air. Only to come back hours later, from the same corner. Usually, nobody was around to notice that: that rich Czech bastard pulled that stunt between shifts, reducing the chances of being spotted with meticulous precision. Unfortunately for him, the Renkas uploaded all the information they scraped on the Stratosphere cloud system. It was Renka #4 that saw him adventuring through that dead end. And Renka #3 – that is, he himself – saw him coming out of the same corridor much later than anyone would expect. The bridge between the Renkas connected two apparently disconnected events that went on during their respective shifts. Sure, Mr. GDP-of-a-small-state might have simply decided to carry out an inspection twice the same day and get either his entrance or exit unnoticed, but that felt contrived. So, Renka’s brain reached the only logical conclusion.

The elevator was fine.

And led to somewhere that was not meant for the public – or, hell, not even the private – eye.

Now, here he was, in front of that selfsame piece of (un)moving metal, gazing at stickers of a forgotten company mascot that never managed to become popular, overshadowed by a plasma chainsaw lizard. Chaingear model kits were selling like hot cakes, especially the 1/64 variant. There were rumors that Greschnik was considering a redesign of the Chaingear Mk. IV just to sell more of them – which didn’t sound far fetched at all. Eikon plushies, though? They had to incinerate so many of them he lost count. Now, that failed excuse of an angel was just a distraction, one he didn’t need to care about. He moved his fingers on the wall, on the metallic keypad, pressed the button twice.

Nothing.

His sensors started tracing the power lines, the internal mechanisms of the switch. There had to be a small microcontroller, somewhere behind that panel. Renka turned around, watched his surroundings one more time. Nobody in sight. Nobody walking down the stairs. Nobody close to the entrance of the corridor. He recalled the status of his clones. Renka #2 was covering for him with a fake call sign, as planned. Pictures of him coming back from the corridor, recorded the previous day, had been fed to the CCTV. Officially, Renka #3 was on duty, while #2 was in his quarters. Like clockwork, as expected from a cohort of beings sharing one brain. Renka tipped his hat down on his eyes. Mr. Magnifico himself was busy outside of HQ and wasn’t expected to come back before evening. That meant that it was the right moment to pull all the stops.

He ripped the metal panel off, threw it to the ground, baring the mess of wires and mechanisms hidden by it. An array of probes slithered out of his fingertips, penetrated into the core of the system, started gauging its internal logic.

Disappointment filled his mind. At a first glance, it really looked no different from any other elevator he hacked in his career. A boring, dumb system, one that didn’t seem special in any way. Except…

If Renka still had a mouth, he might have smiled.

A hidden subroutine. One that triggered a special command if the elevator call buttons were pushed in a very precise pattern in the span of five seconds. Up, down, down, up, down, up, up.

Jackpot.

The thrill of the hunt would have made past-him throw caution to the wind and input the sequence immediately. But, after being turned into a robot because of said lack of caution? It would have been plain stupid. So, instead, he probed the ROM of the microcontroller, tried to gauge whether there was any hidden tripwire. What happened when that sequence was entered? The only clear effect was, indeed, calling the elevator up, plus some jumbled mess of network calls he couldn’t follow. One of them might have been a canary informing Mr. Toomuchmoney of intruders. The logical choice would have been not hitting the button to avoid any serious repercussions.

Well, fuck it. A dead man has nothing to lose.

Renka uploaded all the data about his discovery to the Stratosphere cloud and to an external illegal repository, after encrypting them with a black market military cypher. The standard Stratosphere one had a nasty backdoor by design, so that Mr. G could always access them – whether Renka wanted it or not. So, scummy darknet deals it was. Encrypt, upload, forget, push on. Even if Renka #3 ceased existing, his upload would live on in Renka #7 – or #8, or whatever number was the latest – as soon as he used the charge station in Renka #3’s room, ‘massaged’ with the same black market tools. The thrill of discovery ran through his artificial veins once again. So, with a mix of trepidation and discomfort, he sent the electric signals to the board.

Up, down, down, up, down, up, up.

Within five seconds.

The noise of an engine revving made his heart pump jiggle, his eye lenses shine. Something was moving. Everything was moving. And, as the safety tape rolled back into hidden openings in the walls, he stared in triumph at the now freed elevator doors. Doors that were now opening in front of him.

Exactly as he expected.

“Truly magnifico! Well done, Big G! Well done! Now…”

He clapped his hands in an impromptu applause.

“…let’s see where this ride is gonna take me.”

He would have whistled, grinned if he could. But that was not important. What was important was following the white rabbit down to Wonderland. And, eventually, slaughter him – just because he could.

**

A loud hiss broke the silence. The sound of compressed air, the yells of the hydraulic systems asserted their dominance on their surroundings. A green light pierced through the dimly lit shadows, as the elevator doors opened once again. One step outside, slowly, carefully. Another step. Renka emerged from the cramped cabin, glanced around. That surely was a corridor, one plastered in dull gray – so different from the garish hue of the Stratosphere HQ walls. That made things even more suspicious to him. First off, the additional security layer. The elevator had a facial recognition system that disabled the touch panel if the profile didn’t match. Fortunately, Renka had enough pics of Mr. Magnifico stored in his files that uploading one onto the system via a backdoor had been a non-issue. Hacking the fingerprint scanner proved harder, but not impossible. Heck, even the voice analyzer was fooled by a recording of Big G squeeing like a kid in front of the Q4 2067 earning results. That, though, was proof enough that only one person was supposed to use that elevator. That person had taken so many precautions and layers of security that it would have put Area 51 to shame.

Renka tested his cloud connection. Still stable, despite him being – how many meters below ground? Still, the uplink was very slow. Not fast enough to upload video or audio, just some basic telemetry. Well, at least the pictures of the elevator opening up were already a good appetizer – one for which he prepared a nice surprise before setting foot inside the cabin. That was not important at the moment, it would have mattered only if he didn’t make it back.

He scanned the corridor, switched between X-rays, heat vision and normal cameras. A faint light shone a the end of the alley, accompanied by the soft humming of some sort of engine. No cameras in sight. No sensors. No killer drones – at least, none he could detect. Yet, that was Reiner ‘God-can-suck-my-fancy-dick’ Greschnik he was talking about. That man had to have set up one more layer of protection, if not two, three or even four. Mr. G took protection very seriously, to the point of paranoia – not like that savage cat mutant that got forty women pregnant, including the young Queen Vivian of England (if rumors had to be believed). Renka snickered at that thought. Nekos were just filthy animals, not worthy of the moniker of ‘human’. Repealing the Morelli laws had been the biggest mistake ever.

His mind steered back to Greschnik and his security shenanigans, leaving the neko discourse for another day. His sensors didn’t see or hear anything out of the ordinary. Everything was quiet, too quiet even. Still, he couldn’t wait forever. Not detecting anything – anything at all – he decided to bite the bullet and step forward.

One step.

Another step.

Nothing happened.

At least at first.

A clang startled him. A hiss immediately after. Renka turned around immediately.

The door of the elevator just closed behind him. The engine roared, a buzz accompanied it, as the cabin rose up faster and faster inside the shaft, before silence embraced the facility once again. Renka stared at the closed doors for one, interminable second, before frantically looking for a control panel, anything that could call the cabin back. To his relief, he found it – a small, unassuming button peeking out of the concrete. He caressed it without pushing it, drawing a digital sigh of relief. Good, at least he wasn’t stuck down there forever. He would have wiped away cold sweat from his forehead, if his body could still produce it. His attention went back to the corridor, to the faint light at the end of it. At this point, going forward felt like his best choice.

His steps echoed in the alley, bouncing on the walls all around him. The corridor was relatively long and devoid of any decorations – just plain, reinforced concrete. There were doors scattered on both sides of it – black doors without signs or windows. Renka would have loved to upload the pictures he was taking in real time, but the signal was – if possible – weaker than before. That didn’t bode well, but going back now would have been the coward move. The light he spotted from the distance, though, seemed to come from a different sort of environment. He took the first turn to the right, finding himself in front of a white-ish door with dirty glass windows. The door had one of those big red panic bars and seemed to be made to be opened easily from the outside. Renka found that aspect rather fascinating. Getting in was easier than going out. Whatever lay on the other side, it had to be something important.

He turned on his scanners again. Electricity, heat, X-rays. Still nothing. No cameras either. Weird, but not that weird. Renka counted up to ten, pushed the handle, slammed the door open with all of his strength, almost tearing it apart.

White welcomed him.

White everywhere.

The ceiling, the walls, the floor were white. The computers, the coolant towers, the machinery.

All white.

Renka felt his heart pump stopping for an instant. That room was so un-Greschnik. No colors. No carnival hues. No combinations worth of a colorblind German dandy. All that white gave Renka a sense of discomfort, a feeling of unbelonging. That pale emptiness was dotted by several ovoidal capsules. White too. Humming. All with a green glass cover on top of them. Glowing. So many machines. So many mechanisms. If there were a hidden surveillance system, a concealed sensor anywhere, Renka #3 couldn’t recognize it. Too much to inspect. Too much to detect. He was not meant to be there. Nobody was. It was almost better to turn back and run to the elevator. Yet, something stopped him. The capsules. Too many of them. At least a dozen, maybe more. What was kept inside it? And why were they connected with a central one? One capsule on the left was thrashed, broken – the only sign of imperfection in that absolute homogeneity. The damage seemed old, though, maybe a decade or so old, even. Still, the other capsules… they looked in a much better state. Not brand new, but shiny and well maintained. Renka checked his uplink again. No success. He would have gritted his teeth, if he could. That sight was documentation-worthy, so he had to make it out alive. But learning what lay inside the pods…

He stepped forward.

There was no way he could come down a second time.

It was now or never.

So, he headed towards the closest one, keeping his sensors up all the time, scanning around for potential threats.

He stopped.

Heat signatures.

Barely detectable.

From each capsule.

Human bodies. In a state of hibernation, maybe. He switched back to normal cameras, reached the closest ovoid.

He gasped.

Stepped back.

“…oh, boy…”

That girl, that little, unconscious girl occupying it looked dangerously similar to…

No, that couldn’t be, it didn’t make sense. The second capsule would surely offer a better explanation. He strolled to it, still cursing his inability to upload the pictures he just took, cursing the whiteness enveloping him. Another capsule, another occupant.

Another shriek.

Renka stepped back. Slowly. Slowly. Then faster. Faster. Faster. Till he couldn’t see that face anymore. Till he couldn’t see what lay inside that pod that startled him.

That was huge.

All he thought he knew about Stratosphere was wrong. But that, that also explained a lot of other stuff. All the quirks. All the inconsistencies. He scanned the room with his gaze, from left to right. The central capsule was different. Bigger. Rougher, even. Older than the others, even older than the empty broken one, if he had to guess. Squared letters spelling ‘LILITH’ were plastered on its side, in the same sickly shade of green of the window. Renka’s senses flared up, screaming danger. He was so close to finding out something, so close to piercing the veil that covered up the truth. Going back now was more important, though. If he was found, that information would have died with him. He checked the connection with the cloud. Of course, no pictures, no sounds, no video. Just enough bandwidth to send text messages.

You’re kidding me now…

He crunched his fist. Text was the only reasonable, even if unwelcome, solution. Before that, though, he had to see what the deal with LILITH was. The only named capsule. The oldest. The centerpiece. Connected with all the others. That couldn’t be a coincidence. He scanned the room one more time for noises, sounds, even biosignatures. Still nothing out of the ordinary, nothing outside of the capsules laying under his gaze. Which meant he was alone, alone with that frozen reception committee that waited for him behind slabs of green glass. Renka advanced in silence, moving between the two rows of pods, carefully keeping his surroundings in check at every step. LILITH was waiting for him. Just one step closer. Just one step…

He saw.

He gasped.

He ran.

As soon as his eyes made contact with the content of the capsule, he ran.

Ran away.

Putting together a report as he dashed to the door, forced it open from inside, fighting against the panic handle.

That thing.

What even was that thing? A tumor? A parasite? What was that? What in heaven or hell was that? He had to relay what he saw, he had to relay it for all the Renkas. He left the white room behind, his steps echoed inside the corridor, as he rushed to the elevator. How to convey all that information in text? There was no word to describe all of that. He reached the panel, pushed the mechanical button, throwing caution to the wind. He pushed it again. Again. The elevator had to come down. It had to. He pushed it one more time for a good measure. A whirr responded to his last touch. A humming noise. An electric engine doing its job. Renka felt relieved, managed to cool down, to focus on his report. He didn’t need it, of course, now that he was back to the elevator, but he didn’t want to take any chance. No way someone could understand without coming down there. So, a hint it was. A hint that made sense only together with the original footage he uploaded to the cloud. As his uplink finally picked up the short sentence, saving it in the collective memory space, he tipped his hat. Yes, no amount of text would have helped. He didn’t even understand what he had seen – only that there was… something amiss.

A loud hiss interrupted his thoughts. Compressed air operating the system, a hydraulic mechanism triggering. The doors of the cabin opened in front of his eyes.

Only for another set of eyes to meet his.

Red spectacles.

Black lipstick.

Long blond hair.

A grimace.

“My, my, Renka-chan! Looks like we got a little bit too curious, isn’t it!”

A thumb kept hovering on a button. On a small remote.

Renka’s hand instinctively went for his nape, for the collar wrapping his neck. He stepped back, away from the elevator, trying to say something, to try to interject.

“Mr… Mr Greschnik… it’s not like…”

The thumb pushed the button.

In the last instant of lucidity, Renka found unexpected solace. He was done for. He was going to be replaced. But he wasn’t the only one who was expendable. After all, those stuck-up asshole Angels weren’t that different from him.

As his head neck detonated, as his head exploded, everything turned dark.

And Renka #3 ceased existing.

Back to the nothingness he came from.