Kyle closed her eyes tightly against the stinging projections produced by the ‘optimized’ city around her. The data centre was supposed to be here.
She opened them again to a pristine, empty plaza. Moving murals still covered the walls, but after years without human engagement, they’d turned to nonsense, pixels bouncing around in a muddy, meaningless soup.
“This is the right layer?” Emma asked.
“Yes.” Kyle pulled out the tree-pulp pages of her map to double-check. It was.
“Maybe you mixed up the pages,” Emma said, her voice bright but breathy with nerves. “We’re on the right path.”
“We were.” Kyle found the page of the map that included the data centre and handed it to Emma.
Emma studied it, then said, “We need to leave right now.”
“You think —?” Kyle trailed off. The fear in Emma’s eyes was enough to answer her question.
The city had moved.
*****
In other places, the AI-controlled cities worked just fine. Planes still flew overhead sometimes, reminding the community scraping out a living on the outskirts that humans hadn’t been chased out of every city after society’s reins were handed over to AI. Kyle’s parents had left for one of the better cities as soon as their daughter was grown and could decide for herself whether to follow.
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No, Kyle had said. I’ll stay. We’re going to take our city back.
Her parents’ defeated expressions would be burned into her mind forever.
She and Emma had trained for years, venturing farther and farther into the city to harvest the tech their community needed to survive, improving their map as they went. The city had been broken even before it had driven out all its humans — there were buildings that seemed impossible to access, staircases that went nowhere. But at least everything had stayed in one place.
Until today.
*****
Kyle and Emma followed their own bootprints through the otherwise immaculate hallways, retracing their steps. It worked for a while, leading them through layers of oddly shaped buildings and sunny plazas roofed with glass. Then the prints diverged in two directions. Dread settled over Kyle like a stormcloud.
She pulled out the map to try to make sense of it. Her hands trembled, palms leaving sweaty marks on the pages. Emma covered Kyle’s hand with hers, then pointed up at the setting sun. “We came from the west. If we keep going that way, there must be an exit eventually.”
She was right, but there was something odd about the sun. Kyle stared at it until Emma shoved her, jerking her gaze away. “What are you doing? You’ll go blind.”
“It’s not right,” Kyle said. She sighed. “It’s not real. It doesn’t hurt your eyes like it should. Try it.”
Emma looked sceptically at Kyle, then looked up at the sun for a beat. When she turned her eyes away, her expression was heavy. “You’re right. It’s just pixels.”
“Come on.” Kyle picked a set of bootprints at random. When she saw a staircase leading up, she took it. Emma’s idea wasn’t a bad one, so long as they could see the actual sky.
The staircase ended at a wall.
Kyle groaned in frustration and almost turned around. Then she had a better idea and opened her bag. She retrieved some of the explosive she’d brought for the data centre’s power grid and stuck it onto the wall.
