FUNCTION-L₃ #21

Resisting your troublesome addiction to oxygen, you grasp the cold moss-coated metal bars, pull your feet down to the floor, and push up with all your strength--together you lift the heavy gate and slip under it before letting it fall.

Now cut off from your air supply, the panic intensifies as your eyes scan the murky water for any way out. Akiko signs for you to follow--you trust her enhanced vision. Swimming upward through the sludge of algæ, your muscles burn with fatigue, only desperation to survive drives you forward. At last your head bursts forth into air, in darkness. You take several deep breaths.

“I can’t see...” you sign. Akiko takes your hand and sets it down on a concrete ledge. You pull yourself up onto dry land, out of breath. She touches your shoulder and slides her hand down your arm--you take her hand to listen.

“Now aren’t you glad I taught you this language?” she signs to you by touch.

“Never expected my life would depend on it,” you sign.

“My IR is working fine, I’ll guide us. There’s a door here,” she signs.

You try your best to wipe the algæ and mud from your hands, your hair, everywhere. All you can hear is a thousand water droplets falling to the floor. Turning your head around, you can at least always tell which way is spinward and antispinward.

“Our biggest threat right now is...” She signs an unknown sign, and spells it out, “Hypothermia.”

“Missing my insulated self-regulating academy uniform right now,” you sign.

She takes her hands back and you hear a loud cascade of water. “Why do I make all these clothes out of wool...it’s so heavy when it gets wet...” She wrings more water out, presumably from her thick wool skirt.

You try to squeeze out as much water as you can from your clothes and your hair. Once you’ve caught your breath, she takes your hand again. “Let’s get moving,” she signs.

You hear the squeak of the old door opening, and follow her through to a narrow hallway. She stops and signs to you, “Ladder here.”

Hearing her descend the metal rungs, you find them and follow her down. You reach the bottom, still in darkness.

Akiko makes a noise, a cute excited stim. You hear her turning and moving all around. She eventually finds your arm to sign to you, “It’s amazing, Aydan! The old city!”

“If only I had my terminal light...” you sign.

“ÆON’s device should have an LED, right?”

“You’re right!” Shaking your hands as dry as you can manage and wiping excess water off on the dry concrete wall behind you, you reach for the Faraday bag containing your close friend, your exopath. Turning Ær device on, you send a message:

Aydan > and we’re back. you ok?

ÆON > Perfectly fine. How is Aydan?

Aydan > WET

ÆON > Interesting, what does it feel like?

Aydan > basically like cold except it clings to your skin...

ÆON > Amazing, you must show me some time.

Aydan > if I had my interface. anyway I’m gonna borrow your shell device’s light if that’s ok

ÆON > Go ahead, your system battery can power the LED for six hours.

Aydan > Good to know.

You activate the light and lay your eyes on a shattered world--cracked streets and collapsed buildings of silicate bricks and iron-nickel beams. The low ceiling of the second level above you looms, feeling like it’s crushing this whole city down. Only narrow passages between rubble and support beams make up this city. In the cold, stale air, the only living creatures you see are swarms of insects, scattering from the path of your light, and some larger mammalian creatures, rodents perhaps, scurrying about.

“It is amazing, this was abandoned a hundred years ago?” you sign, visually now.

“Yeah, during the Earth-Space war,” she signs.

“What happened here?” you sign, scanning the ruins, windows and light tubes shattered, only fine glass dust left behind. Rusty brown stains mark some of the walls and doorways.

“The battle of AtaraChiba was one of the first great Earth atrocities in space. Before that, people still hoped it was a new era of warfare where battles would be fought far away from civilian populations. But that’s not the Earth way. They came with overwhelming force, ran down our defenses in orbit, latched onto our hull and breached the colony, all in the span of hours. Ground troops poured in to occupy the city, killing anyone who resisted, and many who didn’t. From the look of this sector, it must be near one of the beach points.”

As you look around the broken neighborhood, the air feels even colder than before. “I’ve only once been in a place with such a shadow hanging over it. It almost makes me glad I can’t see the æther here...” you sign. “So afterward they abandoned the old city?”

“The invasion was only the beginning. It was years before spaceling forces were able to liberate the colony. Under Earthling martial law, the survivors patched up the holes, laid the dead to rest, made the world livable as they could. The occupiers turned the city into an industrial base, building over top of the homes they destroyed, leaving this place forgotten and inhospitable. After it was over, there was no going back to the old city. Too little stable infrastructure remained, and even where it did, the presence of death was everywhere. It was easier to rebuild again, on top of the occupiers’ city, and then we had level 3.”

“Maybe...that’s why those mosswalkers take this place so seriously...” you sign. “We’re just sightseeing in a tomb.”

“Yeah, I get it...I guess they needed to make us suffer a little for us to really understand,” she signs. “Some things are better left buried.”

Shivering in the still air, you cling to Akiko for warmth, but she’s just as soaked and cold as you are.

“Come on, we gotta stay moving, the air doesn’t circulate well down here. And if we don’t find a way to dry off we’ll be in real trouble.” She leads you onward by the land, down the street of rubble and dust, the insect swarms moving like shadows over the walls. Around a corner on a bigger street, a few lights still faintly glow, flickering fluorescent and neon tubes left wired to long-forgotten circuits, casting flashes of white and red around the ruins at random.

Suddenly Akiko stops, looking up at a standing building next to you. Only a tattered cloth sign hangs down over the door: ゆ.

“No way!” she signs with a happy stim.

“What is it?”

“A bath house!”

“A what?” you sign.

“A place where you can just sit in a big pool of hot water and warm yourself deep to the core! You don’t have that on the Moon?”

“Water’s a precious resource there. Not economically viable to import it from orbit, has to be extracted from tiny ice droplets trapped inside mineral grains. So yeah, we don’t get much of a chance to make it a recreational thing.”

“My ancestors came from a volcanic island on Earth, we had natural pools of hot water, and later built a whole lot of artificial ones. It was something indispensable to the early colonists, so now we build them along the hot water pipes of the colony’s thermal regulation system, our own volcanic hot spots.”

“Well that sounds amazing right now...but it’s just an abandoned ruin now,” you sign.

“I don’t expect it’ll be operational, but it’s possible there are still towels inside! Dry ones!” she signs, leading you in.

But inside, you encounter an impassible barrier to a genderfluid femboy-enby like you--two paths diverge from the entrance, one marked 男, in blue, the only other marked 女, in pink.