Season 04 - Episode 02

‘through inaction returning’

Ga is frustrated.

For months she has made no progress and still can't find a way forward. In the aftermath of the battle between GovCo and The Church, she dispatched swarm after swarm of crawler drones to try and catch up with Pho's great caravan of people and troops.

No matter how many she sent however, she could find no trace of them. With each day that passed, the volume of rooms and corridors to be searched expanded outwards exponentially until, after a week of fruitless searching, she gave up.

At least the machine she made has worked, churning out drones on demand and even improving them. The feeling of not being able to find something however, of not being able to see or know, is driving her crazy and so she has redoubled her efforts elsewhere.

With The Church gone, GovCo are clamping down ever harder. Their new line to justify their tyranny is rooting out sleeper cells supposedly left behind by The Church. This makes her plan even more urgent and yet she just can't make progress.

Unfortunately, all her other projects are failing too. The kid, so far above her, has stalled in his upward journey. What he discovered up there shocked her, but it still fits into her plan. She just can't work out how to explain to him what she needs him to do next.

Meanwhile the idiot, the celebrity would-be explorer, so far below her, has also got himself tangled up. He's still well placed to help with the plan if only she can get him unstuck.

Despair threatens to overwhelm her as she sits in front of her monitors and sulks. She reaches for her tall cup of dangerously caffeinated beverage but it isn't where she's expecting.

Tearing her eyes away from the screens she remembers setting it out of reach to avoid knocking it over again. Huffing and grunting she shifts her bulk in her seat and strains, reaching out to grasp and retrieve the cup.

Swigging deeply, she scratches idly at the stubble which has returned to darken her jaw. Ga hates the stubble, not because of how it makes her look, but because it is a reminder of the days slipping by, of the time she is wasting though inaction.

Returning the cup to the desk without thinking, she shifts heavily in her seat once more, rousing herself into action. She is still trying to track down the resistance movement she is certain is operating in The Levels.

They're doing an impressive job of covering their tracks however and so she's taken to looking for signs of their impact rather than than the people themselves. She diligently tracks equipment malfunctions and accidents that happen at just the right time; little collapses and other structural faults that occur in just the right places.

Her perfectly made up lips pout within her burgeoning beard as she cycles glumly through camera after camera. Finally something catches her eye so that she flicks back to review a particular scene. It's an empty meeting hall, derelict, abandoned, useless and dull. For some reason however it looks wrong and it takes her a moment to realise why.

Then, suddenly, she gasps. She's certain, absolutely certain, that the last time she saw this room it was impassable because the floor had collapsed. Now the floor is back however, filthy and old and clearly never having collapsed at all.

Ga lunges forward in her chair, now desperate to go back and review all footage of this room. As she goes however, her elbow catches the cup and knocks it over again. She curses and winces but then stops, aghast.

The cup hasn't fallen. A crawler drone of a design she doesn't recognise is on her desk and has stopped the cup from toppling. It is broad and flat with a deep circular indentation in its back and two little mechanical arms.

As she watches, the drone carefully grips her cup and then lifts it, placing it into the hole in its back where it fits perfectly. The drone then bumbles towards her elbow and settles patiently.

Ga stares at the new drone for a long time. Then, the hairs on the back of her neck prickling with cold, she slowly turns to look at the machine she built to make drones. The small red light on the front is nothing but a power indicator and yet now, impossibly, she feels as if it is watching her.

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