Book 10: Chapter 2 |
Part 1
I couldn’t get up.
I couldn’t breathe.
Instead of something squeezing me from the outside, it was like something was caught inside me. Like a clockwork doll’s gears jamming because someone was stepping on it.
What was this?
What had happened to me?
“…uth…”
I heard a voice, but I couldn’t even tell if it was close by or far away.
“This is going to hurt, but bear with it, Truth!!”
This seemed a little rough for a wakeup call.
“Ah, gah, ahhhhhh!!!???”
“Are you still alive? Looks like I got your dislocated shoulder back in place.”
I was too busy groaning on the ground to respond.
I was inside something like a lighthouse? No, it came back to me. This was the inside of a pillar supporting a highway interchange. We had fled inside because a meteor shower was falling on the city, but the supposedly locked door had been torn from its hinges and slammed into me.
I might as well have been hit by a car.
It wasn’t even an issue of breaking a bone. I was lucky to even be alive.
But I didn’t have time to celebrate my own good fortune.
What about outside?
What about Paris?
What had happened to France’s capital?
“…”
I was afraid to check.
But I couldn’t just stay here either. My stepmom had to be in the city somewhere.
I sucked in some air.
I leaned against young Anastasia and somehow managed to get up on my feet.
My right shoulder was still throbbing, but I took a step. I wobbled, staggered, and then noticed my phone was on the floor. I crouched down, picked it up, and only then realized I was in control of my body.
I took another step.
And another.
This was a narrow space similar to the inside of a lighthouse, so it only took four or five long strides to reach the now-doorless frame.
The unnatural brightness from before was gone. In fact, it seemed unusually dark. A highway interchange like this should have had some streetlights shining down from above, right?
I held a hand against the door frame and stuck my head out to check.
Where were we?
Had we wandered into some strange, post-apocalyptic world?
“…”
For a while, I forgot to even breathe while staring at the gray scenery. I could see slanted buildings through a dusty film that covered everything. But that wasn’t all. What were those shorter piles of rubble? Had entire buildings collapsed?
“Maxwell.”
I wanted data.
But did I really?
Didn’t I just want to access the usual services to prove to myself this wasn’t some crazy parallel world?
“Maxwell! Answer me!!”
I didn’t have a connection.
No signal.
Switching from cell phone signal to Wi-Fi didn’t help. I couldn’t access Maxwell, track Amatsu Yurina’s actions, use the default map and weather apps, or even use the basic phone or email functions.
My stomach went ice cold.
Another basic assumption had gone up in smoke in this lonely new world.
I recalled how paranormal phenomena tended to take out people’s phones first of all. The people who told ghost stories knew exactly what people didn’t want to happen when they were on a dark deserted street or in an abandoned building.
What had happened to Paris?
Was the city well and truly dea-
“Truth!!”
A voice shouted right in my ear.
I heard a creaking sound at about the same time. And that one came from directly above. I also felt something like fine sand falling on my head.
Wait.
You’re kidding right?
“Run!! The highway is collapsing!!”
I didn’t dare look up. Because I knew my legs would lock up if I did. So I faced forward, grabbed Anastasia’s wrist, and ran as fast as I could. I didn’t even make it 10 steps. I was lucky if it was even 5.
Something exploded behind us.
No, that was tons upon tons of concrete falling, crashing into the ground, and sending lots of gravel and dirt into the air. Just like the small gust of wind made when you slapped a desk pad against the top of your desk. The wind-blasted pebbles slammed into our backs, sending us tumbling forward. We couldn’t even think about moving anymore, so I held young Anastasia in my arms, curled up in the fetal position, and hoped for the best.
The deafening sounds continued for a while after that.
We were probably lucky that the initial blast knocked us to the ground. We were scraped up, but it had also sent us a few meters away. We had just barely arrived outside of the danger zone where blocks of the highway came crashing down.
“Are you okay, Anastasia?”
“Y-yes. Ugh, cough!!”
The toxic gray dust that blew past us while we confirmed each other’s safety might as well have been tear gas.
“I-it could have been a lot worse.”
I couldn’t believe what Anastasia said while she breathed in the filthy air and stared up at the sky from the jagged ground without bothering to fix her skirt or shoulder straps.
I did a double take, but she shook her head and continued.
“The temperature didn’t plummet after that dust filled the air and it doesn’t look like all of Paris was reduced to a massive crater. A bunch of small meteors hit the city instead of one big one. And based on what Maxwell said ahead of time, it sounds like this was a meteor shower instead of a single meteor that broke apart in the atmosphere.”
“…”
“That allowed Paris to avoid total destruction. The city is still mostly intact and I doubt the earth is going to enter a new ice age.”
I didn’t think this made her coldhearted. She was probably only increasing the scale like that to avoid thinking too much about the immediate reality before our eyes. She wanted some kind of “good news” she could focus on or her young heart couldn’t bear it.
I wasn’t much different. I was afraid my spirit would break as son as I accepted this tragedy.
I was afraid to look behind me.
What had happened to the highway and the metal support we had been in?
Once all the sounds ceased, we slowly got up and hesitantly turned around. There was no sign of the interchange’s distinctive circular bridges. There was only a bunch of concrete chunks piled up like building blocks a child hadn’t cleaned up. The metal pillars? The jagged pieces of metal that had bent and torn inwards were probably them.
What if we had spent another minute in a shocked daze inside the pillar?
What if we had been even 5 seconds slower in running out?
What would have happened to us?
“We need to think about our next steps, Truth. Even a travel novice like you was carrying his passport around with him, I hope? I think we should go to our countries’ embassies and ask for help.”
“Wait, Anastasia. That was a highway, so there must have been cars driving on it. There might be people buried alive in-”
I was cut off by a loud explosion and a piercing blast of hot wind.
I hadn’t even gotten fully to my feet yet, but I was sent tumbling along the ground again. Over and over. I couldn’t believe it. What was that? A car’s gasoline? I wanted an answer, but my phone wasn’t going to tell me anything. When had I deteriorated to the point that I couldn’t think for myself!?
Anastasia stared in silent shock with her small hands still gripping my clothes.
Paris was still mostly intact. There wouldn’t be a global ice age.
Forcing her mind in a positive direction wasn’t enough this time. Her ordinary feelings were returning to her in the face of people who couldn’t even cry out for help.
But she still shook her head.
“If amateurs like us tried to rescue them, we would only get ourselves killed too. There could be flammable materials anywhere in there and the rubble could collapse at any time.”
“But!”
“I’m not saying we won’t help them! Truth, can you get rid of a pillar of fire several times your height? Can you lift a piece of rubble that weighs a few dozen tons? Some things are beyond your ability. If you really want to save as many people as possible, you need to contact the experts with the proper equipment instead of attempting a doomed rescue attempt of your own. No one’s phones are working, so no one will come to help if someone doesn’t go tell them first!”
She was right.
She couldn’t have been more right.
Without Maxwell’s support, I only had the muscular strength of an unathletic high schooler. And it wasn’t like I had neglected sports in favor of studying all day long either. What would happen if I tried to help without a fireproof suit, an oxygen tank, or even a pair of gloves? I would get myself killed too. I knew that. In fact, I knew exactly what Maxwell would likely say if our connection was still up: get away from there because it’s too dangerous. I knew that all too well.
But.
Even so.
It didn’t matter!!
“I’m going to put out that fire.”
“Truth!!”
“Maybe I can’t drag everyone out of the rubble! But if I don’t put out that fire, they’ll die before help can arrive!! I need to make sure they can still be rescued when the time comes!!”
It was already too late to save them all.
If the fire had started with the gas leaking from a car, whoever was in that car would have been burned to death first of all. Not to mention there were bound to be people who had lost their lives in their cars when the highway initially collapsed.
But there might be people I could still save. Would each car have 1 to 4 people? A large bus could have a few dozen, right? I couldn’t say how many people were buried down there, but I wasn’t strong enough to give up on them all like this!!
I had to search.
I had to think.
Gasoline fires weren’t like normal ones. Blindly pouring water on them would only spread the oil around and possibly intensify the blaze. So what could I use? Literal tons of chemical fire extinguisher? I wasn’t going to find that here. But I was on the right track. Yes, what was it they used to us to stop the burn of napalm?
“Sand.”
I found myself speaking the word out loud.
I had to bet on that.
“We dump sand or dirt on it!! Cut off its oxygen supply and the fire dies!!”
“But how? We don’t even have a shovel!”
“We’ll just have to use something else!”
I was hesitant to call it “good”, but there was only one fire at the moment. That could spread if the flow of gasoline ignited another car, but we could stop that if we extinguished it now.
There must have been a wide variety of vehicles on the highway because a large dump truck was half buried near the fire. The back of the truck was piled high with dark soil.
I was pretty sure there was a lever to operate it in the driver’s compartment.
I didn’t know how it worked without Maxwell, so I just had to try climbing in and grabbing the lever. If I moved it around and the back lifted to dump out the dirt, surely that could put out a fire the size of a car!
I could do this.
I would be helpless if the fire had a chance to spread. In fact, the dump truck would be the next victim. I didn’t know if it used gasoline or diesel, but its size implied a large amount of fuel.
I finally had a clear goal for myself.
So I took the first step.
“Kh.”
Approaching was enough to feel a prickling pain across all of my skin. The smoke felt like it was attacking my eyes more than my mouth and nose. I had to keep an eye on the ground because there was glass and rebar sticking out. Plus, the gaps between the pieces of rubble looked a lot like giant mouths. If I carelessly stuck a hand or foot in there, the limb would be bitten off. So no matter how much it hurt and how much the tears stung my eyes, I had to keep my eyes open. I couldn’t shut them and try to feel my way there.
It was similar in a way to chopping up an onion, so I managed to approach the dump truck with tears in my eyes.
Damn, the driver’s side door wouldn’t open! Maybe it was locked and maybe the frame had been bent. But I sensed someone inside, so I couldn’t break the window and send glass shards raining down on them. I circled to the passenger side. The windshield was so full of cracks I couldn’t see who was inside.
“…”
I felt someone’s gaze on the way.
I looked to my feet and saw a gap between the gray rubble I was walking on. Someone appeared to be trapped below. From what I could see, probably a small child. Damn, they would be roasted alive if the fire spread here!!
The passenger side door rejected me as well. It wouldn’t open.
I couldn’t stand the fire’s heat much longer.
I grabbed a softball-sized piece of rubble at my feet. This was far enough away from the passenger seat, right? I knocked on the window once as a warning and then broke the glass with the small piece of concrete. I nervously unlocked the door from the inside and then it opened.
I climbed in and found a blond man in the driver’s seat. I could hear him groaning and- yikes, both his legs were caught in the crushed part of the truck. He would need a professional rescue team to cut him out.
The driver’s compartment had a lot more stuff than a normal car. There were a few levers in addition to the steering wheel. Which one did I need? I reached for them in order to just try them all, but the man grabbed my wrists.
He stared intently at me.
But I couldn’t speak French and I couldn’t use my translation app without a phone signal, so I could only stare back at him. Then I tried using what little English I knew.
“Help!!”
My voice was cracking and I sounded pathetic.
I had seen on TV that the French wouldn’t respond if you talked to them in English. Not to mention that I had a thick Japanese accent, so even a Brit or American might not understand me.
Maybe my desperation got through to him.
Maybe he was just confused.
Either way, his grip on my wrists weakened and I started moving the levers.
The driver of the burning car had to be dead, but dumping all this dirt on them still didn’t feel great. But I had to do it anyway.
I heard the same warning noise that played when backing up as the rear of the truck vibrated heavily and lifted. Only after starting did I realize the tilting rear of the truck blocked the view of what was happening back there.
Was this going to work?
Would this put it out?
Please work, dammit!! I’m out of ideas if this doesn’t work!!
“Truth!” Anastasia called in from outside. “The fire is out! I think it worked!!”
The strength drained from me.
I did it? Really? It was going to take a lot of time to truly save the people trapped under the heavy rubble or in the crushed vehicles, but at least I had eliminated the threat of fire and smoke. Would this give the experts a chance to rescue them?
Just as the relief washed over me, my head wobbled on my neck.
But this wasn’t due to exhaustion. The ground was shaking in a way I knew all too well.
“Is this…?”
I looked up toward the ceiling on reflex and then froze.
No.
It couldn’t be.
Wait!! Was that really happening now? But all this rubble was so unstable and could collapse at any moment. Who knows how many people were trapped below all that concrete and asphalt!!
But that only mattered to us people.
Nature didn’t care.
This was an earthquake.
I wanted to weep as it mercilessly shook the entire world around me.
Why?
Why was this happening?
I was completely taken aback, but Anastasia shouted in from outside the truck.
“The meteor shower slammed into the tectonic plate, so it doesn’t matter if this region doesn’t normally get earthquakes! The plate received an unnatural level of energy and now it’s springing back!!”
That wasn’t my point.
We had already dealt with nature’s fury. We still hadn’t recovered from the confusion of the meteor shower and the next disaster was already here!? How could nature be so merciless? Didn’t this world have gods like that Valkyrie!?
“Kh!!”
I reached toward the man in the driver’s seat, but it was no use. His legs were trapped up to the thighs in the crushed truck, so there was no pulling him out! But he was in danger if the pile of rubble collapsed!!
That was when I felt an unexpected force.
The man had pushed me away, toward the open passenger side door.
He was smiling.
We didn’t speak the same language and the most I could manage was the word “help” in a thick Japanese accent, but he was definitely smiling at me.
Then the gray landslide crashed into the truck. The driver’s seat was crushed beyond recognition.
I screamed.
My wails did nothing to stop the tremor and the world was shaken up for a full two minutes.
How many people had been crushed during those two minutes?
Hadn’t I saved them by putting out the fire? Was that not enough for you, JB!? Do you think you were so smart for using all your clever technology to send a meteor shower down toward the city? What did any of those people ever do to you!?
I couldn’t get up from the ground anymore.
The next thing I knew, I was curled up on my side in the fetal position.
“Truth.”
Anastasia crossed the rubble once the shaking finally stopped.
But not to comfort me.
“Give me a hand! The collapse widened some of the gaps, so there are people we can pull out now!!”
“…”
It took time for the meaning to seep into my brain.
There were people we could still save?
She put her hands on her small hips and glared down on me where I lay on the filthy ground.
“Are you giving up already after rejecting my wonderful advice and taking this risk!? You’ll lose this chance if an aftershock hits. Lose it forever. You risked your life for this chance, so are you really going to give up before saving anyone!?”
“!!”
I recalled the person trapped below I had seen when circling around to the passenger side.
I was fully focused now.
Anastasia and I pulled the survivors out from gaps in the rubble that stank of rust and gasoline. It was risky work no matter what we did. Too risky, maybe. But every time we pulled someone else out, we would hug and cry with that stranger covered in scrapes. One of them was even a small child. What would have happened if we hadn’t pulled that kid out from that hole in the side of the rubble?
Yes.
They were alive.
And not just them. Anastasia and I were still alive too.
We managed to get away from the rubble when the aftershock arrived. The city might be feeling small quakes for the rest of the day. An amateur like me couldn’t hear any more voices calling for help. Or weak groans, whistles, and metallic tappings. I didn’t think I had overlooked any of those signs. I thought I had done everything I could, but the rescue squad would still need to search the place with specialized equipment or a dog.
“I wonder what my stepmom is up to right now.”
“Who knows.”
Archenemy Lilith was known as a Demon Lord, but she was still family to me. I could only hope she hadn’t suffered this kind of fate elsewhere in the city.
Could I find her?
I was worried about her safety of course, but I was also worried about her preparations for war. She wasn’t still working on that, was she? Unfortunately, I couldn’t say anything for certain. I felt like she and Absolute Noah were capable of anything.
JB had delivered one hell of a preemptive strike, so what if that led Absolute Noah to pull out all the stops? We were in real trouble if the entire organization decided to retaliate.
I felt a chilly sensation on my head.
It came from some rough raindrops that felt like they had iron sand or something mixed in.
I looked up into the night sky to see it had started to pour.
Anastasia didn’t look happy.
“The meteor shower stirred up the air enough for a rapid pressure change. I would recommend not getting any in your mouth. The dirty color is from absorbing all the dust in the air.”
“So an even worse version of acid rain or rain mixed with yellow sand?”
The disasters weren’t done yet.
Knocking over the first domino had set a chain reaction in motion. And here we were without anything as ordinary as an umbrella.
“Let’s get to the embassies. We can start with the Japanese one since you’re not as experienced a traveler. And I bet the Japanese workers will treat a US citizen pretty well too. I can also use my 11-year-old age to its fullest.”
“…”
Without a phone signal, I had no way of tracking down my stepmom.
I doubted we could find her by wandering the city at random.
“Your passport is your most reliable tool at times like this. It’s finally time for you to seek out help, Truth.”
Part 2
The people we had rescued from the interchange went their separate ways. Some were trying to escape Paris and others were heading toward the city center.
We waved goodbye to the small boy who had found his parents and got our heavy legs moving. Our bikes? Who knows where they had ended up. They probably hadn’t survived. They were rentals, but would we still have to pay for them given the circumstances?
The rough rain was not letting up.
Anastasia and I walked through the broken city with our feet making gross sounds on the wet ground. We still didn’t have a single umbrella.
The urban area hadn’t fared much better.
The roads were clogged with rubble in some places and other areas were submerged in mud. Was this known as soil liquefaction? Either electricity or gas must have been causing trouble because dark smoke was rising here and there. I heard a fire truck’s siren, but could they really reach the disaster scene with the roads in the state they were? And did they have enough fire fighters anyway?
“Anastasia, where’s the Japanese Embassy?”
“Near the Arc de Triomphe.”
“And where is that?”
We may have passed it already.
Everything just looked like rubble to me.
I couldn’t spot a single landmark. Had they all collapsed, or had we wandered into unfamiliar territory without a map app to rely on? I couldn’t say for sure either way.
A kilometer through rubble felt so much longer than normal. It was more like walking along a mountain trail or a rocky riverbank than it was walking along the beach. Judging the distance by your pace or how long it felt like simply wasn’t possible at the moment.
“This his hopeless,” I spat, coming to a stop in the rain. I spoke my honest thoughts. “We’ll never reach the Japanese embassy like this! Where are we right now? I need to get a phone signal again so I can use a map! I need to contact Maxwell!!”
“But how?”
Anastasia had decided to focus on the slim ray of hope found in the exhaustion, confusion, anxiety, and irritation of trudging through identical terrain with no end in sight. I knew a hacker like her had to feel the same intense craving for data with all digital options cut off.
“If you have a clever idea I overlooked, I’m all ears. How are you suggesting we get the internet back up with the city in this bad a state? Or do you think a more robust military hotline might still be up?”
“…”
Ordinary phones and computers couldn’t access the internet during this largescale blackout. And even if it was up, ordinary people would have their connections restricted to give the police and firefighters priority.
However.
“There are fire trucks running. Does that mean the police and fire stations have connections?”
“Even if they do, do you really think you can break through their firewall without anything prepared? This is France’s capital and they’re the city’s protectors.”
“What if I did have something prepared?”
“?”
“Remember the remote control virus JB used to hide the approach of the meteor shower? It must have infected the Paris Observatory near the catacombs. We just have to extract the virus from there, modify it a little, and then infect the computers at a police or fire station.”
“Wait, so you’re suggesting we alter the parameters so we’re in charge instead of JB!?”
“Anastasia, you can still use that pet robot of yours, right? You shouldn’t need the internet to rewrite its scripts with your phone. This is a job for a real hacker.”
That settled it.
Getting Maxwell back would open up so many more options for us.
“Then I know where we need to go.”
“Yeah, the ordinary internet is down, so we’ll have to visit the Paris Observatory ourselves and directly extract the virus from their hard disk.”
Part 3
“I’m surprised there aren’t any news helicopters in the air. I thought they would want footage of a disaster like this.”
“The air has to be full of dust. I doubt they would approve a helicopter for takeoff for fear of engine trouble. Or maybe they all switched to Wi-Fi drones controlled with a phone gamepad to cut costs, so the internet troubles have left them all inoperable.”
Reaching the Paris Observatory located near the catacombs meant traveling south. That required us to cross the Seine that ran east to west through the city.
“What happened to the bridges? They’re still crossable, I hope.”
We had just barely avoided being caught in the collapse of that interchange, so I was nervous. My faith in the sturdiness of reinforced concrete had been shaken. The Seine had more than just one bridge crossing it, so if one looked too dangerous, we could skip it and choose another.
“We can’t even locate the Arc de Triomphe and it’s really conspicuous, so I’m worried we might not be able to recognize any other buildings,” said Anastasia.
“At least the Seine isn’t going away. Once we’re safely across, we can head east along the river. How do we reach the Paris Observatory from there?”
“If we’re arriving from the Seine, we take either Boulevard Raspail or Boulevard Saint-Michel south. The Louvre should make a good landmark.”
“The loo?”
“Truth, we passed it by on our bikes earlier, but you completely missed it, didn’t you? The museum’s grounds are big and empty, so it should stand out even now.”
“Then let’s use that.”
A big empty space should work fine. Unless the center of Paris had been transformed into a big crater or lake, a place like that couldn’t have changed too much. It scared me that I couldn’t be too confident about it, though.
Anyway, the first step was reaching the Seine.
Our plan was meaningless if we couldn’t safely cross the river. I didn’t want to get near the Louvre but find all the bridges had collapsed. If we saw a crossable bridge, we needed to take it.
The city was dark with the power out.
There were lights wandering around, but were those flashlights or phone backlights? It felt like we were looking at a field of neon wheat grown by aliens. Everyone had to rely on battery power at the moment, but how long would that last? A phone would only last a few hours unless you had a spare battery or a hand crank generator. Damn, if only the lights powered by a bike’s front wheel used the same voltage and amperage.
It couldn’t have even been past 8 yet.
This was going to be a long night.
“At least it isn’t wintertime,” said Anastasia, holding her small body in the filthy rain. “The city would be doomed if everyone started campfires to stay warm, especially when so many underground gas pipes must have burst. A fire could start just about anywhere.”
Anyone who lost their phone’s backlight because the battery died might try building a homemade torch. There were risks everywhere, but not all risks came from people trying to cause harm.
We made our way south.
Our landmark was the one different color that drew a pointy shape in the night sky: the Eiffel Tower.
That alone was visible from any part of the city. I had seen it while riding my bike alongside the river earlier. I wasn’t sure where we were now, but we would be able to find the river if we made our way toward that tower.
The giant structure was more than 320m tall, but even from this distance, it was clearly tilted and bent. I heard shocked people’s sighs of sorrow as they stared in the same direction from among the rubble. They sounded half sad and half overjoyed it had survived the disaster.
A few times on the way, I grabbed some rebar from the ground and pried open a metal door to save someone trapped in a car.
I threw out the rebar.
I wasn’t going to carry a weapon.
That might sound careless, but a weapon was a visual way of expressing your distrust of those around you. I was afraid of throwing out the possibility of cooperation and inviting in unnecessary trouble. Things would be different if we were dealing with a crazed mob or a Zombie outbreak, but the Parisians still felt cooperative to me.
Maybe that was naïve of me.
There were bad people in any city. A single drop of poison in a large serving of food was enough to kill, so some people would want to have a weapon to put even the smallest doubt to rest. Those people wouldn’t relax even if there was just one bad person in a group of a million.
Also, I had Anastasia to worry about.
That 11-year-old girl’s wet clothing was plastered to her skin.
Everyone else would have someone or something precious to them they wanted to help survive this hell. It was always possible ordinary people would choose to accept evil deeds and abandon the good people.
But.
I felt like inviting in trouble by carrying a weapon would put Anastasia at even greater risk. For now, at least.
“There’s a bridge, Truth.”
Anastasia pointed out ahead.
I heard a watery sound other than the rain.
“Did the meteor shower not fall here? It’s still intact!”
We approached a bridge large enough for cars to cross and I started by shining my phone backlight at the ground before we crossed. There weren’t any weird bumps or cracks where the bridge met the land. But what about the heavy supports made of stone or concrete? My phone backlight was too weak to make them out, but they looked intact when I took a flash photo and increased the contrast to the limit.
Would this really work?
A big truck or bus might be risky, but it didn’t look like it would suddenly collapse if two people walked across.
“We can make it now.”
Wet-haired Anastasia was ready to try it.
She was exhausted, the rain had sapped her body heat, and she wanted to return to civilization. She may have just wanted a place with a roof to rest in. We didn’t know if the Paris Observatory was still intact, though.
“If we don’t use this one, we might find the next one has collapsed. We don’t want to search and search and end up returning here, do we?”
She had a point.
The bridge was only about 100m across. That would normally take only 15 seconds to run across. Maybe there wasn’t that much to fear.
But were my calculations correct there?
If the bridge broke when we were in the center and we were dumped into the river, we would be – what, 50m from the bank? Could we really swim that far in a river’s current with our clothes on? And what if we hit a big piece of rubble or rebar sticking up from the surface and broke a bone? The distances were something else entirely once we were in the water. Screw this up, and we could easily end up dead.
“Truth, are we going or not? Make up your mind!”
“R-right…”
We didn’t need to take a huge risk here, but we also had to cross the Seine somewhere. We had no guarantee the next bridge would be any safer and this one might not remain this safe forever. A large truck or fire engine might try to cross and bring the bridge down.
Could we make it?
I was afraid, but I had to know the truth here.
The yes and no answers weren’t evenly weighted here. It would almost certainly be fine and I was simply afraid of the smaller but more dangerous possibility. But I doubted any choice in Paris right now would be 100% safe. We just had to choose whatever was relatively safe and whatever gave us the higher odds of survival.
So…
“Okay, let’s cross.”
“Got it!”
I was still hesitant.
The ground had to be as hard under my feet as ever, but it felt so squishy, like I was walking on a cloud. I was terrified out of my mind.
My heart squeezed in my chest when I heard something like bedsprings squeaking.
What was that metallic noise!?
“Over here, Anastasia.”
“What is it, Truth?”
I carefully called her over without taking my eyes off a certain point.
The bridge was safe. It wasn’t going to collapse.
But the orderly rows of streetlights had some unnatural gaps. It was hard to tell with all the lights out, but some of the unlit lights had fallen over. The metal poles were heavier than barbells, so one falling on you would probably be fatal. The metal railing dividing the sidewalk from the road had been squashed flat by the fallen streetlights.
“This bridge is only used for traffic, right?”
“What would it carry other than people and cars? Trains maybe?”
I was worried it might have a gas line running through it, but it was a little late for that.
I surreptitiously smelled at the air so as not to scare Anastasia, but that didn’t tell me much of anything. There was a faint bad smell, but it was more muddy than anything. Probably just the river below us. I didn’t know what the Seine’s water quality was like, but maybe the dirty rain was making it stink at the moment. Or maybe the impact to the crust had caused all the sediment to float up from the bottom of the river. I could come up with countless theories, but a high schooler’s knowledge wasn’t enough to reach any conclusions.
Maybe it would be better to get across as quickly as possible instead of stopping and worrying. None of my thoughts were going to make being on the bridge any less risky.
Just as we arrived at the center of the bridge, I finally realized what was wrong.
It started as a noise.
I heard the splashing sound of dirty water. Maybe we shouldn’t have come to a stop for even a moment. We could have escaped the threat if we had just run across at full speed. We might have done so if all the city’s lights were on, giving us a million-dollar nightscape, but the inky darkness had caused us to slam on the brakes. If we ran all out, we might injure our feet on rubble or glass or even fall from a hole in the bridge. We had reasonably wanted to look before we leapt and that had prevented us from taking bolder action.
“Wh-what is that? Truth, are you hearing this too?”
“It’s coming from below.”
Yes, below.
I briefly considered the possibility of gas or water lines running through the bridge. One of them might have sprung a leak. But this didn’t sound like a gas escaping and I didn’t detect the unique stench of gas. Sewage would be unpleasant too, but it wouldn’t explode. This was unusual, but we still needed to keep going.
And.
Anastasia placed her belly on the railing and leaned over the edge, using her legs to balance herself while shining her phone’s backlight straight down.
“Hey, Truth?”
“What is it?”
“Something isn’t right. This is weird.”
She sounded like someone who had seen something she wished she hadn’t. I frowned and followed her gaze down. She wasn’t focused on the bridge. One of its supports maybe? No, she was interested in the dark water. When she shined her light on the support, there was a clear line between the lower wet part and the higher dry part. The bridge must have acted as a roof, shielding the dry part from the rain. For some reason, the wet part was more than a meter above the current water level.
Had a wave splashed up on it? But the river was so much calmer than the ocean.
Then I noticed something unusual.
There were waves hitting the support, but on the wrong side. Wasn’t that the downstream side?
Splash, splash. The unnatural waves were moving upstream.
The bridge shook from the impacts.
“Anastasia, how far are we from the ocean here?”
“More than 100km as the crow flies. What, are you worried about a big wave reaching us? Not even a meteor shower would send a wave this far inland from the Strait of Dover.”
“Then what is that?”
Anastasia didn’t have an answer for me.
She stared off into the distance. If she focused on the darkness, she would be able to see the giant thing fighting the river’s current to approach.
“Eh?”
She must have found it hard to believe even after seeing it for herself.
“How is that possible? How can the river water be approaching from the west? That’s downstream. Is it fighting the earth’s gravity?”
“We need to get out of here, Anastasia. This bridge isn’t going to be around much longer.”
“Wait! But Newtonian physics says this is impossible!!”
“This probably isn’t from the ocean. A meteor hit somewhere downstream! And now the water is being pushed upstream as if by a pump!! The water level dropped because the water was pulled back in toward the bottom of the wave like with the big surfing waves. There’s no time to spare!!”
I grabbed her small hand and took off running.
How long until it hit?
We were at the center of the bridge. Running full speed, half of the approximately 100m bridge shouldn’t take less than 10 seconds.
We could make it.
We would be fine running to the other side.
Assuming we didn’t run into any other trouble at the same time!
“Ah!”
“Don’t trip, Anastasia,” I said, propping up the small blonde girl.
Several streetlights had fallen and there were abandoned cars too, but they weren’t enough of an obstacle to stop us!
We ran across the bridge while squeezing each other’s hand tight as if to take comfort in each other’s warmth.
“Keep your light focused on the ground. I’ll shine mine out ahead!!”
The shaking was getting worse. Even the still standing streetlights might start falling soon.
These few seconds seemed to last an eternity.
I was out of breath.
I was scared and my body was tense with nerves.
It was inexorably approaching.
The details of the noise were gradually filling in. Instead of a simple splashing, I heard a cracking like tree branches breaking. Were they really branches? This wasn’t just affecting the river. The water had overflowed the river’s banks and it was sweeping along the roadside trees and cars!!
“Here it comes, Truth!”
“We’re across! Now we need to find higher ground!!”
The end of the bridge opened onto a large plaza. It was so flat and devoid of higher ground it almost felt like it was out to get us. The only thing there was the Eiffel Tower that was making some disturbing groaning sounds. We could escape the waves in that, but where was the entrance!? Were there stairs? An elevator? It had to have an observation deck, but we would be locked out if the gate required electricity to open.
That wasn’t good enough.
It was too risky without the ability to look up all the necessary information on my phone. We had to stick to things we could figure out on our own!
I heard the crash of a breaking wave. No, that was probably all that water smashing through the concrete embankment. The word water had such a soft sound to it, but if that hit us, we would be dragged down into the water and end up drowning before we figured out which way was up. If we wanted to survive, we couldn’t let that midnight black water reach us as it pursued us.
“This way!!”
“!?”
Anastasia spotted something and tugged on my hand. Was that a tiny little house? No, it was a smoking area made of glass. It was only a bit more than 2m tall, but that was better than nothing!!
“Hyah!”
I grabbed Anastasia below her arms and lifted her up onto the roof. She flailed her little legs in surprise and stepped on my shoulders and face, but now wasn’t the time to complain!
Could I get up too?
“Grab on, Truth. Give me your hand!”
“I can’t, Anastasia.”
“You haven’t even tried!!”
That was too high to climb up on my own and the 11-year-old wouldn’t be able to support my weight, so I would just pull her down with me. I couldn’t risk dragging her away from the safe zone she had found.
I made a last ditch effort to grab at the edge of the roof myself…but it wasn’t looking good. My feet couldn’t find purchase on the glass wall, so I couldn’t climb it. And I couldn’t lift myself with just my arm strength. Ugh, it’s embarrassing, but that’s what you get with a scrawny high school kid. Plus, this was a wet 90-degree corner. With a metal rod I could actually get my hands around, I bet even I could do at least one pull up!!
I could hear the water approaching.
Time was up.
“Anastasia, you stay here!”
“Truth?”
“Do not get down from there! Got that!?”
There was no time for hesitation.
I left the smoking area and ran away from the watery sound. It was in hot pursuit. This wasn’t like being pursued by a truck. Were those snapping sounds a bench or a streetlight? If I looked back, I would freeze up with fear. I knew I would.
I was scared either way.
The tears in the corners of my eyes were proof enough of that.
I couldn’t see anything around me. I was clenching my teeth, but the chattering of my teeth rang loud in my head.
And there was no safety to be found.
Why wasn’t there even one thing I could use to get above the water!?
“Ahhhh!”
The area around the Eiffel Tower was way too flat! There weren’t any buildings I could take shelter in!!
“Ahhhhhhhhh! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!?”
I glimpsed yellow out of the corner of my eye.
I turned my phone’s backlight that way and saw a crepe truck. It was mostly your standard light truck, but the hood stuck out a lot, perhaps to look more fashionable.
That gave me a step at about hip height.
I could use that to climb up onto the roof!
“!”
This was my only option.
I jumped onto the hood and reached toward the roof from the windshield side.
That was when the giant wave hit.
The world around me was swept to the side.
My throat went dry.
Unlike a concrete building with a solid foundation, this truck was only supported by the four tires, so it didn’t matter how sturdy it looked!
Trembling, I finished climbing to the roof and had to cling to that metal island with my arms and legs. It was sliding to the side, but it had to still be safe. The midnight black water was rushing past at a height of 2m, but I was just barely above that. As long as the truck didn’t roll over, I could survive this.
Or so I thought.
When I heard some kind of pressure and looked back, my mind went blank.
I saw a collection of metal beams.
And the giant foundation to support it was far larger than the food truck.
I had forgotten that the Eiffel Tower’s base was here too!!
“!”
I clung to the wet roof like a frog, hoping I could survive the crash.
But then I realized this truck had flammable fuel in its tank. Plus, this was a food truck, so it probably had a propane tank too.
What would happen when it crashed?
The metal frame would bend and the glass would break…but was that really the end of it?
“Pant, pant!!”
I had to make a decision.
Touching that inky black water was a death sentence.
But I defied that conclusion by jumping in myself.
Everything went black.
I nearly passed out from the intense noise and light.,
As soon as the food truck crashed into the metal fence protecting one of the Eiffel Tower’s four supports, either the gas or gasoline from a ruptured metal tank ignited and triggered a large explosion.
Part 4
The water swept me away.
It was deeper than I was tall and the current was too powerful for me to stand up anyway. I struggled and reached out blindly until I felt a sharp pain in my index finger. I may have touched the jagged edge of some scrap metal.
This was too much.
There were too many disasters going on.
But it wasn’t quite the same as multiple independent disasters. Instead of two concurrent disasters with different causes, these had all begun with JB’s meteor shower. But I didn’t have time to prepare for the next link in that chain. Before I could finish dealing with one, more hurdles were stacked in my path. It was like being crushed to death by a falling block puzzle.
If I stopped thinking, it was all over.
If I gave up on that, then I was giving up on my life too.
“Ah, gah!!”
I reached out again and managed to grab at a nearby tree trunk.
It broke away.
Just as I lost that support and the water tugged at me again, I felt a powerful tug in a different direction.
It came from a bus.
A muscular black man taking refuge on the bus’s roof had leaned out and grabbed at my clothes.
So in the end, it came down to muscles.
He used just one arm like a crane to pull me up to the bus’s roof, but I didn’t have the mental wherewithal to thank him in French. I instead resorted to the Japanese default of bowing. A group of muscular men were gathered on the bus’s roof. Were they some kind of sports team? What was France good at?
If I had been waving around a handmade weapon while drowning, I doubt they would have saved me.
The large bus was creaking below us, but it wasn’t sliding to the side like the food truck had. And while the Seine had overflowed its banks, this wasn’t the same as the levee bursting.
A meteor had hit somewhere downstream and that had reversed the flow of water like a pump. This was a single giant wave traveling along the river, so it wasn’t a continuous thing like a tsunami. Once all the unnatural excess was released onto the land, the water level would return to normal. The water would recede and the land would return. The water was still flowing upstream and destroying the city on either bank, but we had no way of warning the people there.
At any rate, the danger had passed.
However.
I was afraid to get down.
I felt drawn to this safe zone.
But I was also worried about Anastasia. I wanted to know if she was safe. Without that motivation, I might have spent the night on the bus roof.
The athletes lamented something together when they saw the ground appear below the receding water. The bus guide, the one small person among those big men, could speak Japanese, so I learned they had apparently gotten to the roof by building stairs out of their piled-up suitcases but those had been swept away.
I hadn’t considered that method.
Even ordinary tools could do the trick if you had enough of them. Maybe I should have used my head instead of giving up so quickly on reaching the smoking area’s roof.
I walked along the muddy ground, retracing the path the current had carried me along. I really wished I had a raincoat and rainboots now.
The smoking area was…still there.
The glass walls had shattered, but that had probably helped keep the force of the water off of the metal frame. That and the roof remained intact.
I shined my phone backlight toward the roof and saw Anastasia’s blonde hair.
She wordlessly climbed down from the roof and approached me.
I thought for sure she was going to hit me.
But she instead grabbed me with her small hands, buried her face in my filthy coat, and cried.
To summarize what I could barely make out,
“Wahhhh! I was so worried! Sniff, wahhh!?”
“Sorry, Anastasia.”
That one hurt.
It pierced me right in the heart. And it was barbed like a fishhook, so it wasn’t coming out easy.
A slap would have been a lot less painful. It really wasn’t fair that she drew on her 11-year-old girl side so much at times like this. I wanted to lend her my handkerchief, but it was soaked with the filthy rain. I had to wipe the tears away with my thumb instead.
She sniffled and let me do it before puffing out her cheeks and looking up at me.
“You womanizer.”
“In what world does a geek like me deserve that title?”
“Open your address book and check the gender ratio!”
Let’s see. Okay, yeah, if you just look at the total numbers, it’s weighted pretty heavily on the female side, but is it really fair to include my big sister Erika, my little sister Ayumi, my mom (biological), and my mom (step) there?
Anyway.
I let her have her say and that must have helped calm her down because she moved to stand by my side instead of in front of me. She was still tearfully puffing out her cheeks, but she firmly held my hand.
Whatever we wanted to do, we needed to regain access to Maxwell. That meant visiting the Paris Observatory and finding JB’s virus. The network for the police and firefighters was still up, so we could get a signal using that.
We traveled east along the Seine.
The Louvre was apparently the landmark we needed to find. After finding that, we had to turn on a large road heading south.
“The Louvre should be visible on the other side of the river,” said Anastasia.
That was all we had to do, but it felt like we were exploring a mysterious dungeon. But that was probably because I had never been to Paris before and didn’t know what I was looking at. A more experienced traveler would be rejoicing whenever they saw a famous building had survived and a local would see this as Paris even if it had been reduced to a pile of rubble.
I needed to be careful.
Once I saw this as a world of survival, my actions would start to stray from my morals. Private property was still private property in the rubble and products were still products. There were no dungeon treasure chests here and I couldn’t just grab stuff from the shelves in someone’s house.
“The rain has stopped,” I noted.
“That was caused by the temporary change in pressure caused by the meteor shower shaking up the air, so it was never going to last long.”
Then everything shook.
An aftershock had hit.
I was afraid the building windows were going to break, so we moved from the sidewalk to the road. The chain reaction that began with the meteor shower was not over yet. At least Paris cared a lot about the city scenery and didn’t string their power lines up on poles. Being careful around trains and trams was probably still a good idea, though.
You weren’t supposed to approach the rubble, the tilting streetlights, the cracked concrete walls, or the crushed cars.
That would definitely be safest, but we couldn’t make any progress if we followed all those rules. And we couldn’t afford to do the smart thing and wait where we were for rescue to arrive.
- Go to the Paris Observatory.
- Extract JB’s virus from the equipment there, alter it, and infect a police or fire station with rights to the emergency communications network so we could remotely control that server.
- Secure a connection to Maxwell using that.
We couldn’t find the Japanese embassy or find my stepmom without completing those tasks first.
“Ugh,” groaned Anastasia, coming to a stop.
She was looking at something, but it was in the distance. A few bridges across the Seine had collapsed, but she was looking past that to an open area with little rubble.
An open area?
So was that the Louvre?
Or what was left of it?
I wasn’t sure what the building had looked like to begin with or how many priceless pieces of artwork were inside, but even if not everything had been lost, some areas had clearly collapsed. Someone who knew more than me might have fainted at the sight.
That said, there wasn’t anything we could do to help.
If we traveled south from here, we would find the Paris Observatory, so I tugged on Anastasia’s hand to force her eyes off of the Louvre.
That was when it happened.
Bang!! Bang bang bang!!
Eh? What?
Those weren’t explosions. They were a lot lighter, but they were still caused by explosives. So were they gunshots!?
“Get down, Truth!!”
“Eh? Eh?”
The noise wasn’t anywhere nearby. Was it from the other side of the river? That was why it hadn’t hurt my ears. Since it was more like distant thunder, I ended up just standing there, so Anastasia had to tug on my hand with both of her small ones to get me behind an abandoned car.
“A stray bullet could easily fly over the river! Even a small handgun can fire a shot more than 180 meters. A rifle bullet can travel three times as far! And they kill you just as dead whether they were intentionally aimed at you or not!!”
“Um, a stray bullet? What is going on over there!?”
More gunshots rang out across the river.
Was that coming from the Louvre?
“Someone’s trying to rob the place. A single painting or jewel is worth more than a million dollars, so I just knew some idiot was going to try it!!”
The loud bangs hadn’t stopped, but something was odd. Yes, it was kind of bright. There were blueish lights traveling on the other side of the river even though the city’s power was supposedly down.
Then it hit me.
I associated them with the color red because that was how it worked in Japan, but they apparently used a different color in France.
“So the police knew to be on the lookout for the same thing. I don’t know how many idiots are trying to break in, but the police have formed a barricade with their cars and the place has become a storm of shotgun and carbine blasts. That’s a threat to us even on the other side of the river!!”
“Why are the cops here armed to the teeth?”
“Japan is about the only place in the world where the police go up against criminals with only a baton at most. Anyway, this way, Truth. And keep your head down!”
Crossing the bridge first had been the right decision. If we had put that off, we would have been caught in this firefight and found the bridge had collapsed.
A white mass swelled out on the other side of the river. The cop cars’ lights were weirdly distorted. Was this that tear gas stuff you sometimes saw mentioned in foreign news?
Then a window of a nearby building really did shatter. My eyesight wasn’t good enough to follow a bullet in flight and I couldn’t be certain that was what had caused it, but it was still terrifying.
I got the feeling it would be best to avoid any banks, jewelry stores, or specialty stores for brand-name watches or bags. If only everything in Paris didn’t look so fancy.
Like I said before, there was nothing we could do to help with the Louvre. In fact, if foreigners like Anastasia and me approached during a robbery attempt, we might just get shot by the cops whiles they were in combat mode. Not to mention that the bridge was out, so our best bet was to head south and leave the river.
“People’s morals are collapsing.” Anastasia led me down a rubble-strewn street. “Has it been about an hour since this started? The disasters we see now may be more manmade than natural. And it’s bad the meteor shower hit during dinnertime.”
“Because that could start fires?”
“No, because now everyone’s going to be hangry. A lack of the basic necessities is the most powerful trigger for a moral hazard.”
There were bad people out there.
But there were also things out there that would lead people to commit crimes even if they weren’t a bad person.
Carrying an obvious weapon would actually put us at greater risk, but should I throw together some makeshift bulletproof vests? Having a phonebook under our clothes could mean the difference between life and death.
But did they even make phonebooks anymore? What color were France’s payphones? What other cheap but thick books could we use as a substitute? Did France have weekly comic magazines?
Were any of these questions remotely useful?
I felt like I was mostly making comforting excuses for myself. I was telling myself I would be safe because I was thinking everything through – because I was doing my job.
We nervously walked through the darkness a while longer.
“We should be arriving soon. The Paris Observatory should be in this area.”
“How can you tell? Did you find a sign?”
“Do you see where the road collapsed over there?”
“Yeah.”
“I can see a bunch of human bones inside.”
I screamed, but Anastasia didn’t seem particularly bothered.
“That means we’re probably directly above the catacombs, but I didn’t know there were underground passageways this shallow. The tourist course has you descend the stairs for more than 100 steps.”
“U-um, Anastasia? Those are bones. Like bone bones. People bones.”
“And? They’re clean bones from centuries ago. There’s nothing criminal about it.”
“Maybe so, but I’ve never heard of ghosts and grudges having an expiration date.”
“There, there. Are the spooky skeletons too scary for you? Does Big Sis Anastasia need to carry you around?”
Apparently she didn’t believe in the ghosts of fallen warriors on old battlefields, but it was hard to write those things off as superstition when you had a Vampire and Demon Lord living in your house. I doubted that kind of supernatural being would lose their power as time passed. For that matter, it looked like this area had ordinary homes and stores. People just lived their lives in homes built on top of a whole bunch of buried bones. Did Parisians not care if their house might be haunted?
“Anyway, they’re primarily made of calcium, so they’ll melt if acid rain gets on them. These are historical artifacts, so we need to treat them with care.”
She placed a construction tarp over the hole to keep any more rainwater from getting underground, but was that really a good idea? I was afraid some unsuspecting person would be walking along the street when they stepped on the tarp and fell through into the bone-filled pitfall. Wouldn’t that be a horrifying surprise. I decided to tell her to set up some warning cones around it.
Anyway.
“Is that the Paris Observatory over there!?”
One building remained relatively intact compared to everything else. Since it was an observatory, it had been built to protect the valuable equipment inside and it had to resist any shaking to make steady observations. I didn’t know what France’s earthquake standards were like, but it must have been built more sturdily than the ordinary stores.
Was that a hospital surrounding it? Wow, now that had collapsed pretty badly. There would probably be a lot of injured people tonight, so I hoped it was still functioning.
And from here on, we wouldn’t just be some unfortunate travelers or innocent disaster victims.
We were after JB’s virus, but the only way to get it directly off the hard disk was to sneak into the building. We weren’t interested in the observatory building itself and we weren’t going to move its equipment a single millimeter, but anyone who saw us would think we were simple burglars.
The gears in my mind turned a lot more smoothly once I was thinking about digital things.
I was glad that it was Anastasia accompanying me.
“Let’s get started, shall we?”
“You bet.”
The gunfight at the Louvre came to mind. That would happen to us if our break in was discovered. But the cops hadn’t set up a barricade here. They must have had a list of top priority targets. The cameras, sensors, and other security devices would have been shut off either by the meteor shower or the earthquake, but I still had Anastasia run a check just to be safe. Once she gave the all-clear, I reached inside an already broken window and unlocked it. I made sure to keep a handkerchief around my hand as I did so.
“What are we looking for, Truth?”
“The biggest and most prominent computer.”
Once inside it was clear that this was more of a museum of old equipment in glass cases than an active observatory. It even looked kind of like a school. Which made sense. If you really wanted to capture the faint starlight reaching our planet, it was better to go to the top of the Alps or to the equator. Since they had been infected by the virus, maybe the data from those other sites was gathered here. The stars wouldn’t be all that visible from Paris. Without a largescale blackout like tonight anyway.
Some kind of thick metal pipe ran along the ceiling. Was it an industrial power line added at a later date? We followed that down the stairs and found the basement was primarily taken up by an electronic equipment storage room. Computers the size of vending machines were lined up inside. The power was out, but they appeared to have batteries to protect the data and equipment.
I had to rely on Anastasia for these things until I was connected to Maxwell again.
She connected a cable to one of the large computers and to the phone that acted as the head of her pet robot.
“What should I search for?”
“You can find the dollgirl.c that Maxwell mentioned using Route 7b. Although every time it copies itself, it tries to evade a search by attaching a random 8-character alphanumeric string to its end. It adds onto itself to create enough of a difference from the security software’s example. A human being could recognize it immediately, but the software won’t delete it unless it’s a perfect match. See, it intentionally disguises itself as an important system file, so a false positive would erase critical data and lead to a flood of complaints from customers. The security company had no choice but to only act on a strict match.”
“I see. Oh, found it! This is JB’s handmade remote control virus!!”
“Opening that will get your own phone infected. Make sure to corrupt the file to ‘freeze’ it before checking inside.”
I had Anastasia use her phone to alter the script. But instead of rewriting the whole program, she only had to rewrite a few of the destinations. She made it so the remote controller was a throwaway server we had access to instead of JB. Now we could control any machine infected by the modified virus.
“Once we infect a police or fire station with this, we can access the emergency line and reestablish contact with Maxwell.”
“Thank goodness.”
However, we didn’t have to march up to Paris’s police headquarters. Even with the communication restrictions in place, the cops would want each individual officer capable of using their phone or tablet. If we could infect any one of those devices, the virus would spread from there.
Which told me exactly where we needed to go.
“I know where we can find some cops.”
“Where? …No, wait. You can’t be serious, Truth!”
“The Louvre. Why waste time searching when we know the cavalry is still using their barricade to protect those national treasures?”
Part 5
Of course, we weren’t going to charge in between the cops and the robbers.
We couldn’t even cross the Seine with the bridge out.
But we didn’t need to cross the river if we only needed to infect them with a virus. A signal could reach them from the opposite bank.
“Truth, are you sure this will reach them!?”
“It will. If they’re using the automatic setting.”
Phone and Wi-Fi signals were heavily encrypted, but some less protected signals were sent out without the user’s knowledge. For example, how was your phone’s clock always accurate? Because it was constantly connecting to the server.
If we sent out a signal in the same format as the clock signal, their device would pick it up automatically. Attach the virus to data such as their current location and it wouldn’t even fight the infection.
It was actually a little tricker than that, though. For example, we had to cover Anastasia’s phone with an aluminum umbrella to concentrate the signal in that one direction so it would travel further. It was difficult to picture since the signal was invisible, but it was like redirecting the signal with a solar cooker.
And the proof of our success popped up on my phone soon enough:
“Connection reestablished. I apologize for all the trouble.”
We high-fived.
Now it was time to strike back.
Part 6
“First of all, the satellite imagery tells me that the Arc de Triomphe still exists,” said Maxwell.
“Then what was the pile of rubble we saw?”
“I cannot provide any solid evidence of anything that occurred while I was not monitoring your actions, but I would speculate you saw a different plaza. If you were traveling northwest from central Paris, you could have found any number of similar locations, such as the Place Jean-Monnet or the Place de Mexico.”
That was good to hear.
Anastasia nearly collapsed in relief at the news that the Arc de Triomphe had survived. She pressed her small butt against the still-wet ground with her knees up.
“So if we make our way there, we should be able to find the Japanese embassy located nearby?”
“Sure. But I am not seeing any guards at the embassy’s front gate, which is highly irregular. I would speculate they have locked up the bulletproof building and sent all of their personnel into the underground shelter.”
I wasn’t used to traveling overseas, so I couldn’t tell how unusual that was, but Anastasia’s eyes widened even though she wasn’t even Japanese.
“They locked it up!? You can’t be serious! You mean they’ve abandoned their job as an embassy!?”
“That is unclear, but we are looking at a war between Absolute Noah and JB,” replied Maxwell.
Yeah. We still didn’t know how big a group JB was, but Absolute Noah had gathered elites from every industry. Someone at the embassy may have known just how dangerous the situation was.
“But underground? Is that really enough to survive this?”
“Sending out a helicopter at night with this much dust in the air would be tantamount to suicide and it is hard to say running away would even lead to greater safety when one side is using a meteor shower as a weapon, so they may have decided it was safest to stay put.”
That was my guess as well, but Anastasia shook her head in disbelief. This was hard for her to accept.
“So the Japanese government doesn’t even know how many of its own people are still in France? How negligent can you get!? The embassy is supposed to be an emergency contact point, but this means no one is guaranteeing the rights of any travelers who show up with a Japanese passport. Are they planning to shut out tens of thousands of Japanese citizens!?”
“If you would listen, you might have noticed I said that was unclear, but border security is fairly lax between EU nations. You could try traveling to Italy or Germany and visiting the embassy there.”
The buses and trains weren’t operating with all this rubble, so how far did Maxwell expect us to walk? Simply escaping Paris was going to be a challenge and what were things like outside the capital? If the chaos had spread, would we have to continue on foot then too?
That wasn’t feasible.
In fact, was that even the correct objective here? Should I really try to escape Paris and return to the safety of my life in Japan?
What about my stepmom?
I wanted to know if she was safe, but I also needed to find out if she had received Absolute Noah’s secret weapon for this coming war.
“…”
I glanced down at my phone.
I had a signal again, but the interception we had set up to track Amatsu Yurina was still down. That wasn’t too surprising when the interchange support we had set it up inside had been destroyed.
We couldn’t track her like that anymore.
However.
We had already made it to the catacombs. That was the area she had initially been monitoring, so it was likely where her shady deal would take place. That meant she was within reach. Wasn’t it worth doing some digging now?
Paris had taken a lot of damage, but JB had only meant that as a deterrent. They would rather drop 33 meteors on a city than whatever Absolute Noah was planning. It was possible JB simply placed no value on the lives of the people in Paris, but leaving Absolute Noah to their own devices would still be a bad idea.
Again, all of this was only a deterrent.
It wasn’t a real attack.
If Absolute Noah and JB really did clash, the result would be far worse. And after all this, Demon Lord Lilith wouldn’t show an ounce of restraint. She was trying to obtain something that she would use, not just hold onto as a bargaining chip.
And that something had to be on the same level as the meteor shower, if not even worse.
“Maxwell, search my surroundings. Use all the security cameras that are still working.”
“It is hard to tell with all the lights out, but a surprising amount of the equipment is still functional. There appear to be a street model that uses a solar panel and a battery in addition to ordinary power. What exactly shall I search for?”
“First, check and see if my stepmom is at any of the nearby hospitals. If not, do a careful search of the catacombs. See if either she or an Absolute Noah assassin are in the vicinity.”
[Unknown_Storage] Evacuation Status [file03]
Category A
Roll call of all 152 staff members is complete.
Temporary staff was given separate orders and waits on the ground floor.
→Important documents and computers have been fully destroyed. The aboveground portion of the embassy is now essentially nonfunctioning.
Category B
Roll call of all 303 members is complete.
65% of those on the original list have been recovered and led to the embassy basement.
This will prioritize continuity of diplomatic contacts over reduction of economic losses.
→We have received complaints from the METI and FSA. We will use Response D. Rather than block them ourselves, we will drag the other ministries into this, such as the Ministries of Finance and of Foreign Affairs. And if necessary, you are authorized to use any bargaining chip up to Level 2 in our private data archive of personnel scandals. But make sure no one suspects the existence of that archive.
Category C
Also, do not attempt to contact the Japanese citizens in the country. It is in the best interests of our nation to accept those losses. No one could come up with a reason why retrieving them would be worth the risk of revealing our squad’s actions to the general public.
→Some squad members have been sent outside after they insisted they could not bear waiting underground during this crisis. Eliminate them by remote-detonating the batteries in their tablets, external powered joints, goggles, and other electronic equipment. Confirm and collect their bodies. We are short on time, but leaving behind any squad member’s body would be a critical mistake. Our squad is not supposed to exist.
The moment we have trained for will arrive shortly.
Gear up and prepare yourselves.
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