Explosive Awakening

Sy was lying on the couch. She didn't have a couch, but then, this wasn't her apartment. Hadn't been for over a decade. The place was bigger than the tiny one-bedroom she now called home, though it wasn't big by any means. The floors were imitation Martian marble, the walls a red-tinged cream.

The door opened and someone came in. Sy, with her back to the door, couldn't see who it was, but there was only one person it could be. "Hi daddy," she said. "How was work?"

"Work was fine, sugar," a dark bronzed voice said, but the voice was shaky. "Ran into a little trouble but nothing I can't clear up. It'll be fine. Did you cook anything?"

Sy felt a pang. "Oh, shit."

"Language, young lady," the voice behind her said. "It's alright. Did you get caught up in your reading again?" Sy held up the screen she was not holding a moment ago. "It's about programming! I've been learning a lot. It's from a couple of Sevo people, I guess they might be your colleagues, daddy."

Footfalls on the fake marble floor, coming closer. "You know, Sarah... Sevo is a really great company, but you always gotta be careful. Never blindly trust anyone. Especially big corporations." Sy sat up and began to turn around. "What do you mean?"

"I'll tell you more later," the voice said right beside her, "once this business at the company is wrapped up."

She turned. A black man with grey streaks in his curly hair, wearing a cream-colored vest that failed to hide a bit of a tummy. His face was blurry and ill-defined, swimming shapes that couldn't get into focus. "Run, Sarah." The blurriness spread across the rest of his features, the walls, the room. Everything around her dissolved into blurriness and blackness, while the man's face grew and grew in her vision. "SARAH! RUN!!"

BOOM!

Sy sat up with a scream on her lips, the nightmare broken by the ungodly explosion. For a moment she'd forgotten where she was. Then she recognized her own home and looked around wildly. She jumped out of bed and tried to turn on the light. Nothing. "Fuck!" She leapt towards the window and looked outside. The entire city was black. Even the slums always had power, were always bustling with dancing lights day and night. A crimson glow shone on the far right of the window, but even pressing her face against the cold glass she could not see its source. She yanked the window open and leaned out.

The power plant was ablaze. The fire was the only source of light she could see, piercing the pitch black night, illuminating black billowing clouds of smoke rising from the ruins. "Holy fuckin' Christshit on a fuckin' spaceship!" she yelled into the wind. Voices were starting up from all directions, others leaning out of the windows below and beside her. She yelled down: "Miss Marolyn! What happened?!" The old woman looked up and yelled back: "Plant blew up, Brooks! Now watch your language and put some clothes on, you're not decent!" "Damn straight I'm not," Sy muttered, feeling her spine prickle with the callback to the nightmare that was still fresh in her mind. She stared at the distant fire, the nightmare that was unfolding in her waking life.

A cold gust of wind made her shiver and she pulled away from the distant sight, retreating to the relative warmth of her apartment and closing the window. She ran her fingers into her hair and clutched it, shards of panic dotting in and out of her stomache every other heartbeat. What was going on? What was everyone going to do? What could  she  do? She closed her eyes and breathed deep. First things first. She checked her apartment to see what still worked, which was absolutely nothing. "Reminds ya how much we rely on fuckin' electrici'y," she muttered to herself. Her external drive still had power however, thanks to the nuclear isomer battery she had installed within the casing. She shoved it into a small pack, throwing on some clothes as she went. She also added her portable welding torch. If she were going on the street right now, she was gonna need self defense.

The last test she put off the longest, for fear of what it could mean. If Heimdall no longer functioned... She could rig up a battery but... Breathing in deep, holding it against the squirming in her stomache and a tightness in her chest, she turned Heimdall on...

And immediately gasped. Though set to maximum distance, she had expected nothing, or a few distant lines of power from batteries or generators. Instead the network of blue lines seemed to stretch into infinity, a massive web in all directions, as if unencumbered with the power down. Sy gaped in amazement, turning her hand left and right, up and down. She could see the entire city, drawn in a glowing blue skeleton, criss-crossing up and down and all around her. Before the power outage, the maximum range had been a few dozen yards at most. She could no longer discern a cutoff point at all.

She pointed her hand in the direction of Sevo. There it was, the strangely, disconcertingly angular building. The lines were denser there, but most of them were dull, unpowered. No alarms. A moment of excitement rose in her throat, but it sunk as quickly as it rose, falling straight into her stomache. "You stupid-ass nigga bitch," she said quietly, the last word catching in her throat. "Triple the guards and you can't get shit there with them 'puters down. Dumb shit." She checked the exploded power plant with Heimdall, but there was nothing there but a black hole. The utter nothingness there was interesting in and of itself, but she had no means of investigating further. Instead she switched Heimdall off, wondering why its range was so much more powerful now. Questions, questions, and no answers. She hated feeling so out of control, but right now, her feeling of obligation to the only one she felt like she could call a friend was stronger. She left her apartment and quickly ran down the stairs, hoping Sirius would still be there when she arrived.